In memoriam István Hermecz

We are saddened by the news that academician István Hermecz suddenly passed away on the 9th October 2011.

He was born on 7th May 1944 in Szeged, graduated as chemical engineer in 1968 at the Technical University of Budapest. Then he started to work for the Hungarian pharmaceutical company CHINOIN and he remained there for his whole scientific career. He started to work in Zoltán Mészáros's laboratory, the highly honored Head of Chemical Research and finished his career as the Head of Preclinical Research of Sanofi-Aventis/Chinoin.

He became Candidate of Chemical Science in 1979 and earned his D.Sc in 1985. His habilitation was in 1996 and he was elected as an associate member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2010. He participated in the development of 3 original APIs. He published 340 papers in international journals, 6 book-chapters and 130 patents. He was a real internationally honored scientist which is shown by the 1700 independent citations to his work. He was awarded by quite a few scientific awards during his career.