Yuri Tsolakovich Oganessian ( ; , born 14 April 1933) is a Soviet, Armenian and Russian nuclear physicist who is best known as a researcher of superheavy chemical elements. He participated with the discovery of multiple elements of the periodic table. He succeeded Georgy Flyorov as director of the Flyorov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in 1989 and is now its scientific director. The heaviest element known of the periodic table, oganesson, is named after him, only the second time that an element was named after a living person (the other being seaborgium).