Born in 1950s Moscow, Irene Yurovska faced major hurdles as a Jewish woman but rubber bounced into her life and changed its trajectory forever
Irene Yurovska, a polymer chemist who was born in Moscow in the early 1950s, describes her relationship with rubber – and her career based on it – as the fortunate product of successful matchmaking. She moved to America in 1991 and now runs a consulting business, YIGlobal, based in Texas. Yurovska is also an executive board member of the American Chemical Society’s (ACS’) rubber division.
‘I became a rubber chemist when I was 17 – it was an arranged marriage,’ Yurovska recounts. She was an A student in high school but as a young Jewish woman living in the former Soviet Union, she recalls facing significant discrimination when applying to university in 1968.
‘My mom was an MD and a PhD, and she said, “Sweetheart, you are Jewish, and you are a girl, so you have zero chance of getting into a medical school,”’ Yurovska recalls. ‘So, I decided to become a chemist and maybe later try to get into the medical field.’
She applied to study chemistry as an undergraduate at the prestigious Moscow State University. There were about 150 applicants, and only 120 available spots. Despite doing very well on the written and oral exams, Yurovska says she and 29 fellow applicants – all with Jewish names – were denied entry. But she performed well enough to be automatically accepted into what was then known as the Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technology (now the Moscow State University of Fine Chemical Technologies).
When Yurovska arrived there, she was surprised to learn that she had been enrolled as a student in the rubber department. ‘I didn’t think rubber was sexy enough,’ she recounts. ‘I hadn’t yet fallen in love with it.’ But she quickly became smitten after coming to appreciate rubber’s uniqueness – including its surprisingly heterogeneous composition. Some rubbers have a molecular weight of one million and others of one thousand, and they can contain both organised crystalline regions and disorganised amorphous areas, Yurovska explains.
Securing rubber production
Yurovska notes that the importance of rubber to national security was first publicly recognised by US president Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, when he created the government Rubber Reserve Committee to begin manufacturing synthetic rubbers domestically. The country’s natural rubber supply from southeast Asia was threatened by the prospect of war in Europe expanding across the world. The US lost access to 90% of the world’s natural rubber supply in late 1941 when Asian production facilities came under Japanese control in a series of coordinated attacks, which also included the attack on Pearl Harbor that resulted in the US declaring war.
But the next year, the Rubber Reserve Committee coordinated collaborative work of major US companies like Exxon, Goodyear, Firestone and Goodrich, and the large-scale production of synthetic rubber began in the US. This led to the development of the chemical corridor in Texas and Louisiana.
Yurovska moved with family to the US in the early more than 30 years ago after completing her education in the former Soviet Union and working for the tyre and aerospace industries there.
She says she left the former Soviet Union to escape discrimination and raise her children in a ‘free’ and ‘equal opportunity society’.
Yurovska went on to earn an MBA in international business and finance at Bryant University in Rhode Island, worked for several performance additives companies in the US, and became a naturalised American citizen in 1999.
Now she is on a campaign to raise awareness about the significant national security threat posed by supply chain issues involving the chemical additives used to make rubber and other polymers, and recently made a presentation about this topic at the ACS’s meeting in Washington, DC.
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