Kadyr Gulamov

Kadyr Gafurovich Gulamov was born in Tashkent on 17 February 1945. He is the son of the Uzbek poet Ghafur Ghulam. In 1963 he began his studies at Tashkent State University, today the National University of Uzbekistan.

In 1967 he was sent to the High Energy Laboratory of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, where he studied under Bruno Pontecorvo, Mikhail Meshcheryakov, Alexander Baldin and other physicists. From 1968 he worked at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, in the high-energy laboratory led by Sodiq Azimov. In 1971 the laboratory was transferred to the Physical-Technical Institute, which later became part of the Physics-Sun association.

His research concerns multiple particle production in collisions of hadrons and nuclei with nuclei at accelerator energies. He led a number of emulsion experiments at CERN, at Fermilab and Brookhaven in the United States, in Dubna and in Protvino, and critically examined several theoretical models of particle production on nuclei. He has published more than 300 scientific papers, mostly in international journals.

He became a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1980, a corresponding member of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences in 1989 and a full academician in 1995, and a member of the Islamic World Academy of Sciences in 1997. In 1983 he received the Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR. From 1989 to 1999 he was general director of the Physics-Sun association, and from 1991 to 1999 chief scientific secretary of the Academy; at his initiative and under his direction the Academy’s Institute of Materials Science was founded in 1993 and the Uzbek research and education network UZSCINET in 1995. From 1993 to 2000 he represented Uzbekistan on NATO’s Science Committee.

In 1999–2000 he was deputy minister of defence and head of the Academy of the Armed Forces, and from 2000 to 2005 the country’s first civilian minister of defence, after which he became State Advisor to the President. At the ministry he set up a military postgraduate programme and a series of military publications, created a language training centre and, in 2004, founded the Armed Forces’ Centre for Simulation and Modelling.

Since 2006 he has been a leading researcher of the Physics-Sun association. In 1997 and 2010 he proposed an international solar energy centre; the International Solar Energy Institute opened in Tashkent in 2013. By presidential decree of 26 August 2023 he was given the honorary title Honoured Science Worker of Uzbekistan. He has also received the Oliy Majlis medal “Mustaqillik” (1992) and the Order of Shon-sharaf (2003).