Aleksander Jabłoński

Who was Aleksander Jabłoński?

Professor Aleksander Jabłoński was a Polish physicist and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

During the World War I he served in the Polish I Corps in Russia. After the war he settled in Warsaw in 1918. In the years of 1919-1920 he fought against Soviet Russia aggression against Poland.

Jabłoński initially studied the violin at Warsaw Conservatory, under the virtuoso Stanisław Barcewicz, but later switched to science.

He received a Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1930, writing a thesis On the influence of the change of the wavelength of excitation light on the fluorescence spectra. Then he went to Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, Germany for two years as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was working with Peter Pringsheim at the FWU and later with Otto Stern in Hamburg. In 1934 Jabłoński returned to Poland to receive habilitation from the University of Warsaw. The habilitation thesis was On the influence of intermolecular interactions on the absorption and emission of light, the subject he would devote the rest of his life to.