Brain gain: Universities worldwide step up to help Ukrainian scholars

Svetlana Tarasova had planned on lecturing to her students at a university in Kharkiv and celebrating a friend’s birthday on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. Instead she awoke to explosions and howling car alarms.

After spending two weeks in a bomb shelter, she started making her way in jammed traffic to the Polish border. Dr. Tarasova explains that by “a lucky chance or part of a miracle,” a professor in London, whom she knew from a scholarly association, contacted her and helped her apply, while on the road, for a position in Poland to give her stability once she arrived. 

“Thanks to [the] people around [me], it is going on well. Still my mind is always thinking about Ukraine, Kharkiv and other cities,” writes Dr. Tarasova in an email from Warsaw,“How to return to normal life? How to return to joy, happiness, learn to smile. Now I am trying to find out how to do it again.”