Irina Belskaya

Biography

Irina Belskaya was born on November 14, 1958, in Kharkiv Oblast. In 1975, she graduated from a specialized physics and mathematics school with a gold medal and entered the Astronomy Department of Kharkiv University. In 1980, she graduated from the university with honors and began working at the Kharkiv Observatory. In 1987, she defended her PhD thesis "Photometry and polarimetry of M-type asteroids".

She worked at the Uppsala Observatory (Sweden, 1992-1993) and Paris Observatory (France, 2002-2004). She received grants from the American Astronomical Society (1992), DAAD (2000), the European Space Agency (2003), the International Space Science Institute (2008), scholarship from the Swedish Institute (1992), and the Marie Curie International Scholarship (2009). In 2008, she defended her Sc.D. dissertation "Optical properties of surfaces of asteroids, centaurs, and Kuiper belt bodies".

In 2010, she received the State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology for the collective work "Advancement of theoretical foundation, development and application of polarimetric techniques and instrumentation for remote sensing studies of Solar System objects by ground-based, aircraft, and spacecraft means".