Death of Igor Katkov

Igor KatkovIt is with sadness that we must inform members and the wider cryobiology community of the sudden and unexpected death of Prof. Igor Katkov in early September 2019. At the time of his death Prof. Katkov was serving a term as Governor on the Society for Cryobiology's Board. 

Prof. Katkov received his education as a Biophysicist in the former “Cryobiological Capital of the World” Kharkov, Ukraine (to use Igor's wording). After completing his PhD on the correlation between the tolerance of bovine sperm to electroporation and freezing, Prof. Katkov undertook a post-doctoral fellowship with Peter Mazur at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1996-1998), researching osmotic and cryotolerance of mouse sperm. He then went on to work with Victor Bronshtein in San Diego, researching high temperature vitrification by drying without lyophilization. 

From 2001 - 2007 he worked at the University of California, San Diego (department of Pediatrics), developing a technique of freezing adherent pluripotent stem cells directly in multi-well dishes. During this time he developed a novel Relativistic Permeability approach, which calculates the exact level of maximum shrinkage during freezing and swelling during dilution. He was the first person to show that a permeable solute may behave paradoxically and have a bi-phasic pattern: moving in and then out during addition (hypersaturation effect) and out and back in the cell during dilution (hyperdiliution effect). In 2001 Prof. Katkov also founded Celltronix and served as Chief Scientific Officer, and from 2015 he combined this with the role of Head of the Laboratory of Amorphous State at Belgorod University (Russia) - serving in both roles until his death. Prof. Katkov’s most recent work has been the development of the concept of and building equipment for kinetic vitrification by hyperfast cooling, namely designing the K-VF KrioBlast™ in cooperation with V. F. Bolyukh from Ukraine.

In 2012 Prof. Katkov edited Current Frontiers in Cryobiology and Current Frontiers in Cryopreservation, the first major update to cryobiology literature since the publication of Life in the Frozen State (2004). During his career he published more than 160 research articles, and was granted 5 patents in the United States and Russia. 

To send a message of condolence please contact Nicole Evans who will pass all messages on to Prof. Katkov's family.
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