Victor Veselago

In 2009, Victor Vesalgo won the C.E.K. Mees Medal from the Optical Society of America (OSA). The recipient is awarded this medal because he or she "exemplifies the thought that 'optics transcends all boundaries,' interdisciplinary and international alike."

He is also on the advisory board of the peer reviewed journal Metamaterials, along with a number of other notable board members who have significantly contributed to metamaterial research. The journal was first published in March, 2007.

In 1980 he became a professor of applied physics for the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As of 2007, he had maintained this position. Moreover, he has been noted to be mainly interested in the sciences of magnetism, solid-state physics, and electrodynamics.

He published his seminal work in a paper entitled "The Electrodynamics of Substances with Simultaneously Negative Values of ε and μ". It was first published in Russian (1967), and was later translated into English (1968). His published paper was key to the advancement of physics research in electrodynamics and optics. It has been cited 4118 times by other scientific works, according to Cross ref and 12,978 times according to Google Scholar as of March 2020.

Besides notable work establishing and publishing the theory of negative refraction in electrodynamics from 1966 to 1972 he is a winner of the State Prize for science of USSR (1976), and a winner of the academician V.A. Fock prize (2004), and an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation(2002). In 2011, Professor Victor G. Veselago was nominated for Nobel Prize. Currently (2007), he is actively involved as an expert for the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research, the Russian Foundation for Humanitarian Research, and he is the vice-chairman of the physics department of the Supreme Attestation Committee of Russia (VAK). He is a founder and vice-editor of the electronic, Russian scientific journal "Исследовано в России", for which the English translation is "Investigated in Russia".

Victor Veselago attended Moscow University and graduated from there in 1952. He received his PhD in 1959 for investigation of molecular spectra with radiospectropy. He later received a Doctor of Science degree in Solid State Physics in 1974 for his investigation of solid states in magnetic fields. His doctorate and Doctor of Science degree were both achieved at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, where he worked (see Career section below).

After graduating Moscow University in 1952, he went to work with the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He was there from 1952 to 1983. In 1983 he became Head of Laboratory of Magnetic Materials in the Lebedev Physical Institute. As of July 2010, he is still listed in this position.

Victor Georgievich Veselago (13 June 1929, Ukraine – 15 September 2018) was a Soviet/Russian physicist, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, and a university professor. In 1967, he was the first to publish a theoretical analysis of materials with negative permittivity, ε, and permeability, μ.