Professor Wladek Minor
Professor Wladek Minor, affiliated professor at our Department, will celebrate his 75th birthday in May 2021. He was educated at our University, obtaining his M.Sc. degree in 1969 and his Ph.D. in 1977, both from the Department of Physics of the University of Warsaw. His scientific interests during that period were focused on solid state physics as he initially worked in the group of Professor Bronisław Buras. His “great American Dream” started in 1985, when he arrived in West Lafayette, Indiana, to take up a postdoctoral position at Physics Department of Purdue University. During his ten years there, Prof. Minor successfully collaborated with his younger colleague from Warsaw, Zbyszek Otwinowski (currently professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas). At Purdue, prof. Minor started his biophysical and crystallographic interests working in famous group of prof. Martin Rossmann.
Since 1995, prof. Minor has been working at the University of Virginia. In the same year he and prof. Otwinowski founded HKL Research, Inc., which provides HKL program suites for protein crystallography – an excellent example of successful commercialization. Using this software many thousands of crystals structures of proteins and their complexes have been solved and refined. For a long time HKL was the most popular software used in structural biology.
Prof. Minor and a group of other Polish structural biologists and crystallographers ( for example Profs.: A. Wlodawer, Z. Dauter, A. Joachimiak, Z. Otwinowski, M. Jaskólski, Z. Derewenda, etc) have created an extremally successful informal Polish research community in the USA, which has commonly been termed even by the Nobel Prize winners as “Polish crystallographic mafia”. This is a great example of collaboration and great scientific success of Polish researchers in the most competitive American conditions.
For many years now, Minor’s laboratory has been a meeting place of students and postdocs from Poland who worked at the University of Virginia. Out of almost 115 his alumni, 53 came from Polish research centers and 14 of them were affiliated with the University of Warsaw. Not fewer than 9 of them were related to our Department of Chemistry and 6 are currently employed at our Department. He collaborates with the groups of Prof. Koliński and Prof. Woźniak and is also a formal mentor in the Core Facility FNP project of Prof. Woźniak visiting our Department regularly within the last years with a small break for the pandemic time.
Wladek and his wife Iwona are wonderful hosts. Their house is not only a meeting place for the Polish and scientific communities but also quite often (long before Airbnb was established) a temporary shelter for people who have just arrived to Charlottesville to work at the University of Virginia. Hence, it is not uncommon for Professor Minor to serve as a “taxi service,” helping newcomers to find a place to live and get accustomed the city.
Professor Minor is one of the most successful Polish scientist. His papers have earned ca. 55000 citations (on average between 2000-3000 per year) and his H-index is equal to 57. He publishes a dozen of significant papers per year and still works on many important projects. His successful career and great achievements are a true inspiration to others, especially for scientists of the younger generation, a source of pride for us and all his coworkers, and also for our Department and for the whole Polish scientific community.
Happy Birthday Wladek. We all wish you well and I hope all you birthday wishes come true!
Prof. Andrzej Kudelski – the Dean of the Faculty
Prof. Andrzej Koliński
Prof. Krzysztof Woźniak
Prof. Minor is the 2018 Laurate of the University of Warsaw and the American Friends of the University of Warsaw Award. The annual UW-AFUW award is given to graduates of the University of Warsaw actively working for the development of Polish science in the USA.
PS. We thank Dan Addison (UVA Communications) for sharing photo of Prof. Minor with us and Joanna Macnar for her help in preparation of this information.