Bernard Delmon (1933 – 2020)
It is sad to have to record the death of a very important figure in the world of heterogeneous catalysis, Bernard Delmon. The following notice of his death has been received from Prof. Yongdan Li of Aalto University, Finland:
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I have a special memory of him. It was 1990, just after the student movement in Beijing in 1989, in the March, and I had just finished my Ph.D. The governor limited us for going abroad for work; thus I had to give up an opportunity to go the US, somewhere in Alabama, for a post-doc. Fortunately it was still possible to go out of the country for conferences. Thus I attended the Symposium of Scientific Basis for the Preparation of Catalysts. However, at that moment, I could not get funding from any source in China, and my salary as a lecturer was only equivalent to 10 USD. Thus I wrote to Professor Delmon to ask for some support. He waived my registration fee and even supplied my lodging on the campus dormitory. The trip was thus possible, but I came Belgium by train, just one week for the one-way trip. That trip also enabled me to go the lab of Julian Ross and then I spent more than 2 years as post-doc in Twente and Nancy.
Over the following years, I attended the Symposia of Catalyst Preparation until before the last time. Also, after I got a chair at Tianjin University, I hosted Professor Delmon in Tianjin and also nominated
him as an consultant of a UNIDO program for 5 years with the Tianjin Research Institute of Petroleum Processing. During that period and before his retirement, he visited Tianjin a number of times. Sadly, following Prof. Delmon’s retirement, my friends at Louvain-la-Neuve, Grange and Poncelet, both passed away very early. Hence, since the 10th Symposium, I have not returned to Louvain-la-Neuve.
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