André Mischke, a former organizer of the Hot Quarks international workshop, passed away at the age of 46 on Thursday 8 November 2018 due to a severe illness he fought for over a year. André was an Associate Professor at the Institute for Subatomic Physics (SAP) of Utrecht University, and a member of the ALICE Collaboration at the European Centre for Nuclear Research. He was previously a member of the STAR collaboration at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. During his career, he managed to build one of the world’s largest experimental groups on heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions. As a person driven by curiosity and genuine enthusiasm, he devoted a large part of his career to building collaborations and connections among several groups across the world. His genuine interest for physics and drive to excel resulted in several new ideas and projects, mainly on the sectors of D meson and heavy-flavor jet physics. He also made valuable contributions to the medical side of physics—specifically, imaging for early breast cancer detection.
André was always thinking about how we use the present to build a better future. Consequently, he was extremely successful in acquiring external funding. Among the many grants he was awarded, it is worth mentioning three grants that came from the Dutch science foundation excellence scheme, VENI, VIDI, VICI, and he was awarded a prestigious European Starting Grant. He was also very active in various organizations: he was chairman of the Subatomic Physics Section of the Dutch physical society and co-founder of the Young Academy of Europe. He was always open to discussion and to listening to the opinion of everyone with the belief that it is always possible to learn from another person’s ideas. Although extremely active in research, he considered education a fundamental part of his career. He taught a “structure of matter” course to Bachelor students, and he was the sub-coordinator of Bachelor studies at SAP.
André also had an unwavering support for young Ph.D. students and postdocs. He was extremely proud of being part of the Hot Quarks organization committee for six years, which is dedicated to young scientists. The location of the recent meeting at Texel, Netherlands was originally proposed by André. The past and current organizers would like to dedicate that meeting to him.
To finish, André was an exceptionally active, talented, and passionate physicist. We will all miss him. We wish his wife, daughter, and the rest of his family whatever strength they can gather to cope with this heart-breaking loss.
