Yuras Karlovich Pozhela ( born 5.12.1925) — a Soviet physicist, an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR (1968), its vice-president (from 1972). He was born in Moscow. He graduated from Moscow University (1951). In 1956—67 he worked at the Institute of Physics and Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR (in 1963-67 as director), and from 1967 he has been director of the Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR.
His work was in the field of semiconductor physics (the effects of heating of charge carriers by an electric field, plasma phenomena in semiconductors, current instabilities in semiconductors with a complex band structure). He studied microwave heating and the noise of hot electrons. He predicted and detected a number of kinds of e.m.f. arising from non-uniform heating of electrons (1977), and the microwave emission of hot electrons. He proposed methods of studying the electron spectrum in semiconductors with the help of magnetoplasma waves. He detected microwave generation under avalanche ionisation in homogeneous semiconductors with non-uniform heating of electrons.
The Lenin Prize (1978).