Eugenia Brin
Eugenia Brin, of Hyattsville, MD, is a scientist and activist who recently retired from NASA, where she analyzed data related to climate and weather forecasting. Along with her family, she resettled in the United States with the assistance of HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) 30 years ago, in the fall of 1979. She is now on the HIAS Board of Directors.
Born in Moscow, Brin is a graduate of the prestigious School of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University. Her husband, Michael, is an internationally renowned mathematics scholar of dynamical systems, a multidisciplinary field that examines order in chaos, as in mechanical and electrical systems. They have two sons: Sergey, co-founder and president of technology at Google; and Sam, a recent graduate in computer science from the University of Maryland, who is working as a software engineer in Boston.
The Brin family is extremely grateful for the welcome they received in the United States and the lives they have built here. As a result, they have given back in extraordinary ways and have made a number of significant gifts to institutions that can realize their vision for the future. Most prominent among these are several major gifts to the University of Maryland -- where Michael teaches and where both sons attended -- including the Michael Brin chair in Mathematics, the Eugenia Brin Professorship in Data Assimilation, and the Eugenia Brin Professorship in Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders.
HIAS has also been the beneficiary of the Brin family’s generosity. Even before Eugenia Brin was elected to the HIAS Board of Directors in October 2006, she had already accepted the responsibility of heading HIAS’ archival preservation project, which will focus on preserving the portion of the archives documenting the largest wave of Russian Jewish immigration to the U.S. As a board member, she helped HIAS initiate a bi-lingual Russian/English social networking site for Russian Jewish emigres to this country, called myStory (www.mystory.hias.org). This was established and recently launched on the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Jewry movement. The idea came to her when she realized that the more than 400,000 Russian Jewish emigres, brought to this country by HIAS, have a commonality of backgrounds, history, culture and immigration stories and that they needed a platform to share these and be in touch with one another. Today, Russian Jewish emigres can post their stories, photos, and art on this site (with music and video capability coming soon), exchange ideas, and contact one another to form an on-line community. In addition to her extensive activities with HIAS, Eugenia Brin has served as a board member of the Alef Bet Montessori School in Rockville, MD, and is currently a member of the Patient Council of the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
