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.

Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso (Laboratoire d'Océanographie, CNRS, Villefranche-sur-mer, France) received the 2020 Ruth Patrick Award of the ASLO (Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography) for "his leadership in, and commitment to, addressing ocean acidification". In 2014, professor Gattuso was elected at the EurASc as one of the Blaise Pascal medallist selected by the Earth and Environmental Sciences division. He is one of the world leaders on ocean acidification which is due to the absorption by the ocean of the anthropogenic atmospheric CO2. He also is deeply involved in the International Panel for Climate Change (IPPC) reports and he did contribute to the China - Europe Frontier Forum on the future of marine sciences and technologies, held in Shanghai and on-line on 20-21 October 2020.

Pierre Braunstein, our Head of the Chemical Division and research director of CNRS, Strasbourg, France, is winner of the Franco-Portuguese 2019 prize attributed by the Sociedade Portuguesa de Química (RPQ). This is a biennial prize that distinguishes outstanding Portuguese and French chemical researchers, every two years.