For the wake of the departed

Sonya Kaschieva 15.02.1943 - 11.04.2026

On 11 April, on the eve of Orthodox Easter, after a long and prolonged illness, our Bulgarian colleague Professor Sonya Kaschieva passed away. There is a belief that only bright people pass away on Easter days...

In 1966, Sonya graduated from Sofia University with a degree in Atomic Physics and joined the Institute of Physics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests were in the investigations of radiation defects in metal-oxide-semiconductor structures obtained after irradiation or implantation. From 1972 to the present, she has worked at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the BAS. In 1973, she majored at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, USA. In 1976-1977, she worked in Kyiv, at the Institute of Semiconductors of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, where she prepared a Ph.D. thesis that she defended in 1978. Later, Sonya came to Russia, to JINR and worked from 1986 to 1989 at the Frank Laboratory of Neutron Physics. She participated in the first experimental investigations of the interaction of high-energy (MeV) electrons with semiconductor heterostructures on a microtron MT25 at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions.

In 1999, she brilliantly defended her doctoral thesis at JINR on the topic "Generation and annealing of radiation defects in metal-oxide-semiconductor structures" and was awarded a doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences for the development of a new area in science.

Regularly coming to Dubna from Sofia, Sonya Kaschieva was the head of 18 joint Bulgarian-Russian scientific projects funded by grants from the Plenipotentiary Representative of the Bulgarian Government at JINR. The Higher Attestation Commission of Bulgaria approved Sonya Kaschieva in 2005 as a professor at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Her scientific activity is reflected in more than 120 scientific articles in scientific journals with a high impact factor and more than 30 reports at international scientific conferences. She is the main author of two monographs.

We will always remember Sonya as an excellent scientist and colleague, who JINR was a home for in science and that made the Soviet Union and Russia close countries for her.

Colleagues and friends