Theodore Vladimiroff

Before war broke out in Europe and before Ted and his younger brother were born, their parents danced ballet for audiences all over the world. They lived in Paris which hosted a large number of Russians who had left before and after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. Ted and his brother grew up with posters announcing their parents’ performances covering the walls. After the Allied Forces liberated France and the war ended, the Vladimiroffs emigrated in the summer of 1946. After a visit to an aunt in New York, they spent their first American summer on Cape Cod. They chose Sea Cliff as their permanent residence because it had a small but growing Russian community. To keep food on the table his father took a factory job. His mother became known as Sea Cliff’s ballet teacher, Madame Vera.

That fall Ted started school in Sea Cliff with the Class of ’58 because of his rudimentary English. In 7th grade he joined our class. He went on to win the senior award for the highest average in math and science, although unlike Einstein, he did not continue with the violin. He did continue playing tennis, a sport his cousins played and which his mother thought “was kind of a social thing I could get into.” When he left Sea Cliff to study engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology he won his varsity letter in tennis. He also switched from engineering to physics because, “I decided that I was more interested in the science behind the derivation of a formula than its application to a practical problem.”

He switched again for graduate work and financed by a National Defense Graduate fellowship in Chemistry he continued at Stevens to receive his masters in ’62, and his Ph.D in ’67 working with the well known and highly regarded E.R. Malinowski on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) shifts in molecular structure. He went on to do two years of post-doctoral research at SUNY Stony Brook. For entertainment and relaxation Ted restored old cars and during his graduate school years his transportation was a ’57 Porsche speedster.

In 1969 Ted began work at the Picatenny Arsenal as research chemist. He would stay there 37 years until retirement in 2006. As part of his work Ted was a co-inventor of a new high explosive insensitive to impacts that was patented by the Department of Defense in 1995. Since retiring Ted’s interests have shifted to bioscience and biotechnology, especially as they might help reduce health care burdens. Ted likes to keep up on research but says, “Unfortunately science is a full time job.” Another possibility occurred to him one day when he and several other people were at his brother’s fishing camp. “A friend asked me what propane was and I started thinking what a profound ignorance.” Ted is thinking about ways to introduce children to atoms and chemistry by way of an entertaining story that doesn’t use scientific vocabulary or even mention the word chemistry.

Meanwhile he keeps fit lifting weights and working out, and mentally fit perusing the New York Times Book Review every week to choose the reading that occupies much of his free time.

Ted stands among the well published writers in the class, with more than 40 articles in print after review by the best scientists in his field--chemistry. Quantum chemistry and its analyses of how atoms respond to molecular vibration, however, is not the kind of publication we find in airport bookstores or even on Amazon. Nor will you find the Journal of Molecular Structure in your dentist's waiting room.

When John A. Pope received the Nobel Prize for his work in computational chemistry, he was standing on the shoulders of a relatively small group of pioneering chemists in that field, among them Ted Vladimiroff. The concentration of Nobel selection committees on individuals and small teams, often misrepresents the importance of larger and less organized groups in doing the fundamental science behind the winner's visibility.