Igor Kurchatov, Russian physicist and academic (b. 1903)
Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (Russian: Игорь Васильевич Курчатов; 12 January 1903 – 7 February 1960), was a Soviet nuclear physicist who is widely known as the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Along with Georgy Flyorov and Andrei Sakharov, Kurchatov is known as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb" and later "the father of the Soviet nuclear missile" for his directorial role in a clandestine Soviet nuclear program formed during World War II in the wake of the Soviet discovery of the Western Allied efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After nine years of covert development, as well as Soviet spies successfully infiltrating the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, codenamed First Lightning, at the Semipalatinsk Test Range in 1949. In 1954 he was awarded the USSR State Prize in physics.

From 1940 onward, Kurchatov worked on and contributed to the advancement of the nuclear weapons program, and later advocated for the peaceful development of nuclear technology. In 1950, Kurchatov contributed in the development of the hydrogen bomb with Sakharov, who originated this development as Sakharov's Third Idea. Other projects completed under Kurchatov included the installation and the development of Soviet Union's first particle accelerator, the Cyclotron; inauguration and establishment in Obninsk of the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, the world's first nuclear power plant; and the completion and launching of the Lenin, the first nuclear-powered surface vessel under his leadership in 1959.