11 April 2016
 
In Memory of Dr. Rostislav Kamensky
 
A conference in memory of Dr. Rostislav Kamensky (1936-2008) was held at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute on 7 April 2016. Dr. Kamensky who would have marked his 80th birthday that day made significant contributions to permafrost engineering research. He pioneered field and theoretical research on the thermal interaction of engineering structures with frozen soils and environment, pipeline laying methods in permafrost, and refrigeration systems in northern construction. For 50 years, his life was inseparably associated with Yakutia and the Permafrost Institute where he began to work in 1958 after graduating from the Kuybyshev Institute of Engineering at Moscow. From 1988 to 2003 Kamensky was director of the Permafrost Institute. At this position, he showed himself as a talented science administrator. His wise and able leadership helped the Institute go, with minimum losses, through the period of the toughest socio-economic crisis that hit the country in the 1990s. Kamensky had trained many of the current generation of permafrost scientists and engineers who gathered at MPI on his birthday to present talks on the role of engineering geocryology in cold regions development. 
Kamensky meeting2