It is with great sadness that we must report that Prof. Rustum Roy, one of the early pioneers of zeolite synthesis, passed away on August 26, 2010.

After obtaining B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at Patna University in India, Rustum Roy received his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for 65 years. In the 1950's his research group was the only academic group in the USA doing synthesis research on zeolites, and Len Sand and Fred Mumpton were both former students. In 1958 he and Joe Smith (then an Assoc. Prof. of Mineralogy at Penn State) organized what was probably the first International Zeolite Meeting at Penn State, attended by R.M. Barrer and D.W. Breck, amongst others. In 1962 Prof. Roy founded the first interdiscplinary Materals Research Laboratory, and was its Director for 23 years. He was the Evan Pugh Professor of Solid State Chemistry and Professor of Geochemistry, and was also a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science at Arizona State University and a visiting Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona. He was an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering and of numerous national and international scientific academies. He authored and co-authored over a thousand publications. A more complete orbituary can be found here.

It is with great sadness that we must report that Prof. Imre Kiricsi, organizer of the First International Conference of the Federation of European Zeolite Associations (FEZA) in Eger, Hungary in 1999 and one of the members of the FEZA Council, passed away on July 11, 2010.

Prof. Kiricsi initiated the foundation of the Hungarian Zeolite Association in 1992, and had been its president since 1998. During this time, the HZA organized several international meetings and Prof. Kiricsi served as the co-editor of the resulting proceedings. He was the Director of the Applied Chemistry Department at Szeged Univeristy Attila Jósef and the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Gold Cross of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2006 and the Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Prize in 2010. Some more details on his scientific achievements have been compiled by his colleague Janos Nagy and can be found here.