In memory of Jean-Pierre Badiali

After a serious illness, our colleague and good friend Jean-Pierre Badiali passed away on April 15, 2016, in the afternoon. His death is a great loss to all of us and the whole scientific community. We express our deepest condolences to the family of J.‑P. Badiali, colleagues and friends. Jean-Pierre will remain in our memory as an outstanding scientist and an incredibly good person.

Jean-Pierre Badiali was born on October 20, 1941 in the village of Mirande in the Midi-Pirenées region in France. Having graduated as an engineer from École Supérieure d`Electricité in 1970, he entered the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as a researcher. Here he pursued his scientific path starting from the position of “Stagiaire de recherches” and moving up to the Research Director of Exceptional Class. He was a head of the lab at Université P. et M. Curie in Paris. J.‑P. Badiali was elected as a member of the National Committee of the CNRS four times. From 1995 to 2000 he was the President of the Section “Molecules: Structure and Interactions” of the National Committee of the CNRS. Later, from 2001 to 2006 he was a member of the Scientific Council of the CNRS and was in charge of the group “Theory of Interfaces” at the “Laboratoire d’Electrochimie et Chimie Analytique” of École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris and Université P. et M. Curie. Since 2010 he has been working in this group first as a researcher and after as an Emeritus researcher.

A continuous and fruitful collaboration of J.-P. Badiali with the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics (ICMP) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) has been going on since 1991. He attended many conferences in Lviv. He was also an active participant of various joint international projects. Among them there were two INTAS projects and project Eco-Net, in the framework of which the theory of corrosion developed by J.-P. Badiali and his group was applied for the modeling of self-sputtering processes in nuclear materials. Due to the initiatives of J.‑P. Badiali, the ICMP was a frequent participant of the CNRS-NASU collaboration. J.‑P. Badiali was a member of the Editorial Board of the "Condensed Matter Physics" journal. His support played an important role in the creation of the "Physics of Soft Matter" Council of NAS of Ukraine. According to the decision of the Scientific Council of the ICMP of NAS of Ukraine from December 20, 2013 the title of Doctor honoris causa is conferred on Jean-Pierre Badiali for the basic results which provided explanation and description of various types of phenomena in electrochemistry, surface science and soft matter, for the development of new successful approaches in statistical mechanics as well as for his personal initiative and participation in different projects aimed at strengthening collaboration between France and Ukraine.