Displaced Tulane University assistant chemistry professor Igor Rubtsov's bout with Katrina began even before the hurricane struck, when his daughter's flight from New Orleans's airport was cancelled.
So, Rubtsov and his family left town at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, to drive to Atlanta so his daughter could catch the second leg of a flight to Moscow, where she is a student at Moscow State University. She made that flight, but Rubtsov and his wife then found themselves stranded.
Thus began a multi-state odyssey for the Russian-born physical chemist and his two Tulane graduate students that ended up at Duke, where he and his graduate students are studying in the chemistry department, as well as living rent-free in Central Campus apartments.
"David Beratan has provided us everything here, so it's great," Rubtsov said of Duke's chemistry department chairman, who hastily arranged working spaces, computer access, class enrollments and housing for the visitors.
Rubtsov's Tulane experimental group, which collaborates with Beratan's theoretical group at Duke, reassembled in Durham after a week on the run from Katrina's wrath.
Graduate students Dmitry Kurochkin and SriRam Gopal Naraharisetty arrived at Duke after temporarily taking refuge beyond the hurricane floodwaters' reach, respectively in Texas and Mississippi. The Rubtsovs' travels also took them through Alabama and Mississippi, where they picked up Kurochkin and his wife.
While Rubtsov's Tulane office and laboratory were undamaged by winds or flooding, he said he will not be able to perform his group's complicated infrared spectroscopy experiments remotely.
Fortunately, he was able to take two computer hard drive disks of data with him. "So for the first three months I'll be fine," he said. "I need to write two proposals and I need to write two research papers."
Beratan, Duke's chemistry chair, said rearranging the lives of Rubtsov's group, as well as another Tulane postdoctoral researcher whom he has also relocated to Duke, "was a little hectic, but it wasn't too bad."
The folks at Duke, in all of the offices that I interacted with, were just terrific," Beratan said. "I was nervous about getting them all linked into the system here, getting the students enrolled and finding them places to live. But really every time I talked to a new person or visited an office, the answer was always 'yes.'
And people were answering my e-ails within minutes pretty much," he added. "It was just remarkable. Having them basically settled in a day or two after they arrived was huge.
Rubtsov and Balamurgan Besinghu, a displaced postdoctoral theoristfrom a second Tulane research groupwho will interact with Beratan's group, "will continue getting their salaries from Tulane," he said. "Since they won't have to pay rent they'll be able to do just fine financially.
"But I'm worried about the graduate students," he added.
Since Rubtsov's graduate students are both in the United States on visas -- Kurochkin is from Russia and Naraharisetty is from India -- "I'm not sure they will be able to serve as teaching assistants," Beratan said.
If their visas allow it, he is hoping that enough displaced Tulane undergraduates may sign up for first year chemistry courses to justify employing extra TAs. Another option is to provide the undergraduate with stipends from Beratan's own discretionary funds, he said.