The European Academy of Sciences mourns the loss of Sir John Meurig Thomas, who recently passed away. He was elected as Member of our Academy in the Materials Science Division in 2010 and received the Blaise Pascal Medal in Materials Science of our Academy in 2014.
A pre-eminent scholar in materials science, Sir Thomas was a scientist, educator and university administrator, whose work had widely acknowledged influence globally. He is generally considered as one of the fathers of solid-state chemistry. He was among the first to use electron microscopy as a tool to study structure/property relationships in materials. His research also had a major impact in heterogeneous catalysis and surface science, as he identified active-site reactivities from the surface morphology of numerous systems.
With his passing, the materials science community and the scientific community in general have lost one of their giants.
