Heinz Hoffmann
With deep sorrow we learned that Heinz Hoffmann passed away on 28. February of this year. He had been an eminent scientist in the field of colloid research since the late 1960’s and was very instrumental in starting and running ECIS. With him ECIS has lost one of his founding fathers and honorary members, who shaped the society very much in its fledgling years. He was its first President in 1987 and its General Secretary from 1987-2000. ECIS has always been very dear to him, considering it like his “colloid family” of friends and colleagues, as it certainly feels to many of us as well. He kept coming to the conference long after his retirement in 2003 with the conference in Ljubljana in 2018 being his last participation.
He started his research career with a PhD from the Technical University in Karlsruhe in the field of electrochemistry in 1962, to be followed by a postdoctoral stay at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. There he not only became familiar with modern methods to study fast kinetics but also met his charming wife Claudia with whom he stayed happily together for the rest of his life. Applying the techniques for fast kinetics to study surfactant systems then became his first venture into colloid science. It led to pioneering work for understanding the dynamics of the micellisation process, which is very important from a fundamental point of view but also highly relevant for many applications of amphiphilic systems. With this research field he moved in 1975 as a full professor to the newly founded University Bayreuth, where quickly he established a large lab focusing on fundamental surfactant science. In the course of the following years, he and his team tackled many topics from colloid science: investigating lyotropic liquid crystals such as ringing gels or iridescent lamellar phases, the structure and rheology of viscoelastic surfactant solutions and vesicel gels, sponge phases (L3), the properties of dispersed clay particles or solubilization with the help of surfactants, just to name a few. In his research he addressed many fundamental scientific questions, but at the same time always had a good notion for how such fundament properties could be converted to interesting practical applications. Especially in the later stages of his career such application oriented research was becoming increasingly important to him and after his university retirement he started an independent research lab, where he did applied colloid research funded by industry grants.
For his work Heinz Hoffmann received many awards, the most prominent ones certainly being the Overbeek medal from ECIS (2011), the Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein Prize of the German Bunsen Society (1976), the Ostwald Prize (1995) of the German Colloid Society, and the Lectureship Award from the Chemical Society of Japan (1998). This shows the high esteem that he enjoyed in the international scientific community and he was highly active in promoting international collaborations. However, he also was instrumental in making the University of Bayreuth an internationally known centre of colloid science, for instance by establishing the Bayreuth Centre for Colloids and Interfaces (BZKG) in 2000, an institution for whose founding he had been working for a longer time.
Many of us will remember encounters with Heinz Hoffmann. He was always highly interested and enthusiastic about tackling scientific challenges and to venture into areas which were not yet well understood. In discussions with him one could always notice his enormous scientific curiosity and the will to extend our existing knowledge by using his broad knowledge and intuition in the field of Physical Chemistry. He enjoyed arguing about scientific points, being rigorous about them and enjoying the discussion but always keeping this away from a personal level. Everyone in contact with him could directly feel the honesty, empathy and generosity of his personality, as well as a good sense of humour. One could always rely on his serious interest in helping science to advance and also to support the human beings associated with this science, the colleagues, scholars, coworkers and friends around him, for whom he always had an open ear.
We all will miss him very much, but by keeping ECIS a thriving community we retain a legacy to him, which he would surely enjoy to see growing and advancing further.