WASHINGTON, November 5. /TASS/. Russian American Scientist Alexander Kabanov has become the new President of the Russian-American Scientists Association (RASA-America), replacing Valery Fokin. The transfer of authority ceremony took place at a conference of the Russian-speaking scientific community held in Washington.

"We believe that our American organization will go on and grow stronger. We will carry out international activities, assisting people all over the world who find themselves in a situation similar to ours," Kabanov said in a speech dedicated to the organization’s future tasks and challenges.

"We will continue the RASA conference series," he went on to say. "We have a tradition in Russia when researchers active in various areas come together and tell about their work. This is a rare happening but it became common in the Soviet Union," Kabanov noted, adding that he did not know any other scientific conference of that kind.

According to Kabanov, the next RASA-America conference will take place in November 2019 in the town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It may be dedicated to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907), as the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2019 as the International Year of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.

In 2017, University of North Carolina and Moscow State University Professor Kabanov received RASA-America’s Gamow Prize for "the cycle of works that initiated the use of polymeric nano-materials for the delivery of drugs and nucleic acids to the cell." The 2018 Gamov Prize went to Stanford University Physics Professor Andrei Linde and Evolutionary Genomics Research Group Senior Investigator at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Eugene Koonin.

"We will continue awarding the Gamow Prize," Kabanov said. "Today, the award honors researchers from the Russian community who contribute to the Russian science. Perhaps, we should expand it, this issue requires discussions. Perhaps, it should be an award for all researchers contributing to science - not necessarily community members contributing to the Russian science," the new president of RASA-America said.

The Russian-American Scientists Association was founded in 2008 "to maintain, strengthen and develop common intellectual and cultural space of the Russian-speaking scientific community." "The association brings together scientists, educators, graduate students and other scientific and technical professionals from universities and industry, as well as innovators and entrepreneurs in science and technology from the former Soviet Union, who are currently working or studying outside the Russian Federation, regardless of their nationality, religion, political views and economic interests," the RASA-USA website says.