Professor Oleksa M. Bilaniuk, 82

As a physics teacher at the University of Rochester in 1963, he spent a year in Argentina, helping the government there set up an atomic research installation.

As an expectant father in 1966, he took his wife on a teaching assignment to India, where their first child was born.

"It shows the adventurous spirit that both he and I had," Larissa Bilaniuk, professor or radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, said of her husband.

On Friday, Oleksa M. Bilaniuk, 82, emeritus professor of physics at Swarthmore College, died of brain cancer at his home in Wallingford.

Dr. Bilaniuk became an associate professor of physics at Swarthmore in 1964, retired as centennial professor of physics in 1990, and continued to teach there until 1993.

From 1998 to 2006, he was president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.A., housed in Manhattan, and was a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

He contributed to an English-Ukrainian dictionary of physics and technology, to be published this year, and was on the editorial board of the Ukrainian Journal of Physics.

During sabbaticals, he conducted nuclear research at accelerators in Europe and in the United States.

Born in the Carpathian Mountains of Poland, he was forced by German invaders in World War II to work on a farm in Germany until liberated in 1945, his wife said.

"Even at that young age, he knew some English," among several languages, she said. And so for the American military, "he translated to people that had ended up in Germany - Ukrainians, Polish."

He languished for years in a displaced-persons camp until a scholarship allowed him to study engineering at the University of Louvain in Belgium, his wife said.

After arriving in the States in 1951, he used a scholarship at the University of Michigan to earn a bachelor's degree and master's degree in mathematics and physics, followed by a 1957 doctorate in nuclear physics.

From 1960 to 1962, he was an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and before going to Swarthmore he accepted an invitation from the Argentine government to help with atomic research.

He was certified as a pilot for single-engine and glider aircraft.

Besides his wife, Dr. Bilaniuk is survived by daughters Larissa Sand and Laada Fitzhugh and three grandchildren.

Friends may call after 10:30 a.m. tomorrow at St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church, 1013 Fox Chase Rd., Jenkintown, where a Requiem Mass will be said at 11:30. Burial will be in the Catholic section of St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetery, South Bound Brook, N.J.