Hasmik Rostomyan and Hripsime Mkrtchyan, final-year PhD students at the Cosmic Ray Division (CRD) of the Alikhanyan National Laboratory, are the recipients of the Kirakos Vaporciyan Scholarship for the 2012-2013 academic year.  Their award was granted on December 14, 2012

Kirakos Vaporciyan, the late husband of Mrs. Sandi Vaporciyan and the brother of Mr. Harutyun Vaporciyan, strongly believed that supporting education and world-class science in Armenia is of critical importance to Armenia’s future.  He was an unwavering supporter of the Cosmic Ray Division and made several personal pilgrimages to CRD’s high-altitude research stations on Mt. Aragats.  His legacy includes the support of the brightest students at the Cosmic Ray Division and a very important project allowing the Cosmic Ray Division to analyze, display, and share its state of the art research and data with the rest of the world’s scientific community. In his honor, CRD has named this project the Vaporciyan Maltivariate Analysis and Visualization (VMAV) platform. When this project is completed next year, it will break new ground in web-based scientific “ecosystems”.

Hasmig Rostomyan and Hripsime Mkrtchyan are currently two of the six bright PhD students at the CRD.  Hasmig and Hripsime are in their final year and are working hard on their experiments and data analysis to write their PhD thesis by the summer of 2013. As is the tradition at the Cosmic Ray Division, their thesis defense will be attended and judged by top cosmic ray scientists from around the world.  Naturally, they are taking their work very seriously and aim to impress the judges and make proud their advisor, Prof. Ashot Chilingarian, and the Vaporciyan family.

Hasmik, Hripsime, and Prof. Chilingarian are grateful to the Vaporciyan family for diligently carrying out the wishes of Mr. Kirakos Vaporciyan and for their own generous support of the CRD and its students year after year, and also to the Armenian General Benevolent Union for managing the Kirakos Vaporciyan Scholarship fund for CRD’s students.

Mr. Kirakos Vaporciyan was a member of the greater Detroit Armenian community and the Armenian Engineers and Scientists of America – Michigan Section.