Marat Gabdullovich Mingaliev

Marat Mingaliev was born on 28 March 1953 in Urazgildino village, Ulyanovsk region, USSR, and studied radio physics at the Kazan State University. After graduation in 1975, he started working at the Special Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) of USSR (now Russian) Academy of Sciences under supervision by Yurii Pariiskii, eventually becoming Pariiskii's "right hand" at RATAN-600. Marat Mingaliev's scientific interests, focused on observational radio astronomy with an emphasis of studies of active galactic nuclei and radio astronomy instrumentation, were influenced by the scientific atmosphere of Yurii Pariiskii radio astronomy school. Marat Mingaliev remained a staff member of SAO for his entire professional life.

Under Marat Mingaliev's leadership, scientific activities at the SAO's RATAN-600 radio telescope were carried out for many years. He began his career at the observatory in the early days of the RATAN-600 operations. Marat participated actively in testing of the telescope's main observing modes. In the first years of scientific work, he studied various bodies of the Solar System, in particular, the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. His observations resulted in the discovery of special properties of the radio emission of Io, which had been confirmed by direct in situ studies 10 years later.

Over the last 20 years, scientific interests of Marat Mingaliev were focused on the studies of active galactic nuclei - from the brightest representatives of this class of objects, blazars, to the first supermassive black holes in the Universe - extremely distant quasars. As a result of long-term monitoring of ~2000 blazars with RATAN-600, multi-wavelength properties of their radio variability were obtained on the time scale of 2-3 decades. Under Marat's leadership, a multi-frequency interactive catalog, named BLcat, of blazars' radio measurements was composed (https://www.sao.ru/blcat/.

The results of Marat's studies are presented in more than 200 publications in the field of observational radio astronomy, and hardware and methodological developments of the RATAN-600 instrumentation. With his active participation, the main astrophysical tasks of RATAN-600 were broadened and successfully carried out. This included involvement of RATAN-600 in various national and international collaborations.

Marat was actively involved in scientific and organizational work, was a member of the Russian Telescope Time Allocation Committee, a member of the Bureau of the Scientific Council of the Physical Sciences of RAS, a member of the European Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies (CRAF), was an active participant in cooperation among radio astronomers of leading Russian and foreign scientific and educational organizations. Marat Mingaliev was engaged in scientific training of postgraduates, attracting students from leading universities in the USSR and Russia for getting hands-on radio astronomy experience and becoming involved research projects.

Marat Mingaliev died on 3 September 2024; he will be remembered as an accomplished researcher who made a major contribution in developing radio astronomy in the USSR and Russia.