With great sadness we report the recent death of Volodymyr Kozlovskyy, a former member of the Soil & Crop Sciences community at Cornell. Volodymyr Kozlovskyy (1968-2023) was the first postdoc to join the research program of Olena Vatamaniuk. Though only here for one year (2005-2006) he co-authored two manuscripts on mechanisms of cadmium tolerance in Drosophila and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. He returned to Ukraine to pursue his academic career at the Institute of Ecology of the Carpathians of the National Academy of Science, where he continued to collaborate with the Vatamaniuk program, with support from the CRDF-GLOBAL US-Ukraine Competition.

Volodya joined the Ukrainian army in 2022 following Russia’s military invasion and was killed while trying to save wounded friends during the ongoing combat. He will be dearly missed by his wife, Natalia Romaniuk (a former postdoc in the Phillip Rea lab at the University of Pennsylvania) and their two sons, 17 years old Yaroslav and 15 years old Andriy, extended family, and friends. Olena Vatamaniuk reports that only a couple weeks ago, she and her husband had sent Volodya a card signed by Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffman (Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor, Emeritus, Chemistry and Chemical Biology) with good wishes and willingness to meet after the war was over.

For those who might wish to make a donation in support of Volodya’s family, please contact  natalia.romaniuk@gmail.com for the Paypal link. PayPal is temporarily waiving fees for all Ukrainian accounts.