of the D.I. Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Engineering in Moscow. In 1960 he moved to Kiev to the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IGIC-ASU), where he started to work on his PhD thesis "Thermodynamic characterization of molten mixtures of zinc chloride with chlorides of alkali metals"; this was successfully defended in 1964. In 1974 he defended his DrSc thesis "Coordination of the first row transition metals in molten salts: investigation by spectroscopic methods."
In 1975 he organized the Laboratory of High-Temperature Inorganic Chemistry at the IGIC-ASU. The laboratory focused its research on the chemistry of coordination compounds in ionic melts, high-boiling molecular melts, and vapor phase, as well as laser chemistry and quantum chemistry of condensed coordination systems.
In November 1992, S.V. Volkov was elected as an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The following month he became the director of the IGIC-NASU; since 1993 the Institute was awarded the name of its founderthe first President of the ASU, Academician V.I. Vernadskii.
In recent years S.V. Volkov'