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Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Physics

Pavel Nadolsky, Physics, among the Dallas Morning News stories of immigrants living in Texas

Dallas Morning News

Originally Posted: February 7, 2017

This is an excerpt from a larger Dallas Morning News article.

Pavel Nadolsky

Pavel Nadolsky speaking at the Designing Integrated Systems conference last year in Hamburg. 
Pavel Nadolsky speaking at the Designing Integrated Systems conference last year in Hamburg.

Pavel Nadolsky looks at Trump’s executive order from a mathematical perspective. Nadolsky, 47, of Dallas, is a professor of theoretical physics at Southern Methodist University. His life is dedicated to making calculations in large scale.

He was born in Uzbekistan while it was still part of the Soviet Union. “It was like Texas for the United States,” he said. “The southernmost part of the Soviet Union.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Nadolsky was studying at Moscow State University and became a Russian citizen. In 1996, unable to find scientific work in Russia, he moved to the United States to study at Michigan State University, where he met his wife, who is from China.

Their son was born in 2003 while Nadolsky was continuing his research at SMU before he continued on to the Argonne National Laboratory and back to Michigan State. He became an associate professor at SMU in 2008.

After 9/11, travel was complicated for Nadolsky. “I couldn’t see my family as often,” he said. “For several years I could not leave the United States.”

Nadolsky said his family was subject to a very detailed vetting process that took almost five years to complete. He believes the process was especially arduous and long because of his complicated background and the prioritization of Iraqi translators who had worked for the U.S. government.  READ MORE