April 2002
Leonid Ozernoy, professor of computational sciences and physics, died Feb. 28 of cancer at the age of 62. A member of the George Mason faculty since 1993, he became a full professor in 2000.
"He was a very distinguished scientist of the first order," says Murray Black, dean of the School of Computational Sciences. "He published more than 250 papers, which is a remarkable feat for anyone. He was also a wonderful, warm human being. He had absolutely the highest integrity."
Born in Moscow, Ozernoy was one of the former Soviet Union's refusniks and came to the United States in 1986. He worked at Boston University and Harvard University before coming to the Washington, D.C., area in the early 1990s to join NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland as a consultant.
At George Mason, he taught courses in computational sciences and physics, most recently Colloquium on Computational Sciences and Informatics, Astrophysics, and Modern Astronomy.
Ozernoy's recent research involved the dynamics and structure of interplanetary dust, the physics of nonthermal processes in active galaxies and quasars, the dynamics of compact stellar systems, astrophysics of black holes, the formation of galaxies and large-scale structures in the universe, and observational cosmology.
Ozernoy's honors included election as Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in London. He also received the National Research Council-NASA Research Associateship Award in 1991.
He is survived by his wife, Marianne, and two daughters.