Portland State mourns the loss of one of its young and brilliant lab managers, Iulia Hanczarek.
Hanczarek, 39, was hit and killed by an alleged drunk driver while walking along Southwest Barbur Boulevard on March 17.
During this time when PSU is working hard as an institution to keep all the members of our community safe it is deeply sad to learn about the loss of a precious life in a preventable traffic accident.
Hanczarek, a PSU chemistry graduate, managed a physics lab alongside Associate Professor of Physics Jay Nadeau focusing on bacterial motility and chemotaxis. Nadeau describes their meeting as pure chance.
Nadeau met Hanczarek in 2017 sitting on the steps of the Science Research and Teaching Center, pondering job opportunities post-graduation with a fellow student.
“She was a chemistry major, and I needed a chemist for several of the studies I was doing related to searching for microbial life on Europa,” Nadeau said. “Iulia was the first full-time person to join my lab and basically helped to build it from scratch. She was involved with nearly all of the projects and had published several papers. She liked to work in the evenings, and to decompress she would take long walks. She thought nothing of walking 7 miles home several times a week. She was trying to get back into running, and a group of us from the lab did the Black Light Run together in the fall.”
They worked on several projects together, including microbial life on Europa and whether marine bacterium swimming was affected by simulated microgravity. Next up? Space.
“She really wanted to send an experiment to the International Space Station to test in real Microgravity,” Nadeau said. “In fact, we applied for a grant to do that just this month.”
“Iulia was just beginning her scientific career, and this is a huge loss,” Nadeau added.
PSU offers its sincere condolences to everyone who knew Hanczarek.