Armen Sarvazyan

2 July 1939 – 29 May 2026
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer

Armen Paruyrovich Sarvazyan founded Artann Laboratories in 1995 and directed its research for three decades. Trained as a biophysicist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, he began his career at Pushchino studying the mechanics of soft tissue and the thermodynamics of water bound to proteins and nucleic acids — questions that came to underpin nearly everything Artann later built. He moved to the United States in 1992 to organise the Laboratory of Biomolecular Acoustics at Rutgers University, and founded Artann three years after that. His central idea was that the stiffness of tissue carries diagnostic information, and that sound can be used to measure it: the method he and his colleagues patented in 1998 for imaging elasticity with a remotely induced shear wave became the basis of elastography, now in routine clinical use worldwide. He published some 200 papers, held about 100 patents, led more than thirty projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the Department of Defense and the Gates Foundation, and founded five companies to carry the research to patients.

He was made an honorary professor of the MSU Faculty of Physics in 2002 and elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2022; among his honours were the Acoustical Society of America’s Helmholtz–Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal in 2016 and the IEEE Rayleigh Award in 2021. He was an artist throughout. As a student in 1962 he designed the badge that became the emblem of the MSU Faculty of Physics and is still in use today, and in later years he worked seriously in sculpture — portraits and compositions carved from wood, stone and driftwood, shown in New York and across Europe, with a star-shaped gallery he built on his New Jersey property to hold them. He composed palindromes in Russian, Armenian and English. He is survived by his wife Tatyana, his daughters Noune and Narine, and his grandchildren, who continue the scientific and artistic work he began.

This account draws on the memorial by O. V. Rudenko in Physics–Uspekhi 196(8), 2026, doi:10.3367/UFNr.2026.08.040170.