Valentin Ulomov

Valentin Ivanovich Ulomov was born on 7 January 1933 in Tashkent. In 1955 he graduated from the mining faculty of the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute, specialising in geophysical methods of mineral prospecting, and went into seismology: first as a junior researcher and, from 1959, as head of the Tashkent seismic station.

From 1960 he was deputy director of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR. In 1964 he defended a candidate’s dissertation at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth in Moscow on the deep structure of the crust in south-eastern Central Asia, and in 1974 a doctoral dissertation on the structure and dynamics of the region’s crust in relation to earthquake prediction. In the same period he proposed founding a Centre for Seismic Observations of Central Asia and Kazakhstan in Tashkent and led it for about fifteen years.

In 1966, the year of the strong Tashkent earthquake, Ulomov took part in setting up the Institute of Seismology of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences and was its deputy director until 1985. The station he headed became the Tashkent Seismological Observatory, which he ran until 1990. In 1981 he received the Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR for work on seismic hazard zoning and forecasting, and in 1984 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan.

His research covered fundamental and applied seismology, the structure and dynamics of the lithosphere, the physics of earthquake sources and earthquake prediction, and seismic regionalisation. He is credited with a registered scientific discovery, the release of radon as a precursor of earthquakes, and with more than 250 scientific papers, including monographs on the deep structure and dynamics of the Central Asian crust.

From December 1990 Ulomov worked at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth in Moscow, heading the laboratory of continental seismicity and, from 2004, serving as chief researcher. In 1995 he was elected a full member of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 2002 he received the State Prize of the Russian Federation in science and technology for the methodology and map set of the General Seismic Zoning of Russia, OSR-97. He died in Moscow on 6 June 2017.