It is with great sad­ness that we have learned that Pro­fes­sor Eric Der­ouane passed away on 17 March in his home at Luz Lagos (Algarve) Por­tu­gal.

Pro­fes­sor Der­ouane will be remem­bered by his stu­dents and col­leagues, both in indus­try and acad­e­mia, for his cre­ative lead­er­ship of the Namur and Liv­er­pool catal­y­sis lab­o­ra­to­ries and for his men­tor­ship of many col­leagues and stu­dents..

Pro­fes­sor Der­ouane was world renowned for his many con­tri­bu­tions in catal­y­sis for petro­chem­i­cals and fine chem­i­cals, par­tic­u­lar­ly for his work on zeo­lites and their role in cat­alyt­ic process­es and the use of in-situ meth­ods for cat­a­lyst char­ac­ter­i­za­tion.

Pro­fes­sor Eric G. Der­ouane obtained in 1968 his MSc in Chem­istry at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty and his Dr.Sc. at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liège. He then became a Research Asso­ciate of FNRS (Bel­gium). In 1973, he was appoint­ed as Pro­fes­sor at the Fac­ultés Uni­ver­si­taires Notre-Dame de la Paix (FUNDP) in Namur, Bel­gium, where he cre­at­ed the Lab­o­ra­to­ry of Catal­y­sis. In 1995, he was invit­ed as Full Pro­fes­sor and Direc­tor of the Lerve­hulme Cen­tre for Inno­v­a­tive Catal­y­sis at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool. Eric G. Der­ouane became Pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Faro, Por­tu­gal in 2003.

His con­tri­bu­tions to catal­y­sis have been rec­og­nized by the Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship of the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (1981), the Catal­y­sis Lec­ture­ship of the Société Chim­ique de France (1993), and the 1994 Franc­qui Prize. He was a Cor­re­spond­ing Mem­ber of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Bel­gium, Edi­tor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of Mol­e­c­u­lar Catal­y­sis A, and past Pres­i­dent of the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of the Catal­y­sis Soci­eties (EFCATS) 1995–1997.
 
With kind regards,
 
Miche Che, Fer­nan­do Ramoa Ribeiro and Jacques C. Védrine