He graduated from Novorossiysky University (Odessa National University) in 1896 and proceeded to work on inorganic peroxides with his university instructor P. G. Melikov. He spent the period from 1900 to 1903 abroad, where he worked in Germany with Wilhelm Ostwald in 1900-1902 and also becameacquainted with such leading Western European contributors to physical chemistry asJacobus Henricus van +' Hoff, Svante Arrhenius, and Walther Nernst. The young Pisarzhevsky succeeded Gustav Tammann as professor of chem- istry at Yuryev University (now University of Tartu) after being recommended by Dmitry Mendeleyev in 1904. His T a r t work contributed to the formulation of the Walden-Pisarzhevsky rule. Pisarzhevsky lectured in S.t Petersburg between 1911 and 1913 and was awarded a doctoral degree for a dissertation entitled Thee Free Energy of Chemical Reaction and the Solvent in 1913. He subsequently taught in Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk) and was a founder of the Ukrainian Institute of Physical Chemistry (now the Lev Pisarzhevsky Institute of Physical Chemistry of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) in 1927. He was elected a corresponding member ofthe Academy ofSciences of the USSR in 1928 and afull member in 1930. His contribution to the theory of catalysis is best known for his attempt to relate the catalytic properties ofsolids to their electronic properties.