Obituary Otto Hutzinger

Environmental Sciences Europe Obituary Otto Hutzinger Michael McLachlan 0 3 Karl-Werner Schramm 2 3 Dieter Lenoir 2 3 Kristina Voigt 2 3 Henner Hollert 1 3 0 Department of Applied Environmental Science (ITM), Stockholm University , 106 91 Stockholm , Sweden 1 Institute for Environmental Research (Biology V), RWTH Aachen University , Worringerweg 1, 52074 Aachen , Germany 2 Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen, German Research Center for Environmental Health (GmbH), Ingolstadter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg , Germany 3 Otto Hutzinger at the ECO-INFORMA Planning Meeting, Argonne National Laboratory , Argonne, IL, USA, 16 November 2000. Margaret MacDonnell, Werner Geiger, Kristina Voigt, Otto Hutzinger, Almut Heinrich. Photo: Kristina Voigt Otto Hutzinger passed away on September 22, 2012 in Bad Ischl, Austria. He was a scientific pioneer in the field of environmental chemistry and a great architect of the institutions that continue to serve and nurture this discipline. His passing is a great loss to environmental research, especially to the global environmental chemistry community. - information systems, data analysis, and modeling aspects with respect to the field of environmental chemistry. After moving back to the university, Otto evolved from being a researcher to creating and fostering research environments. He was extraordinarily successful in this regard. The departments that he built and led in Amsterdam and Bayreuth produced an astonishing number of talented and successful environmental chemists and toxicologists. Many of them went on to take positions of scientific leadership in their fields. Through them, he has disseminated his vision of contaminants research as a multidisciplinary endeavor with an important responsibility to deliver sound science to society and his management philosophy which is centered on generosity, trust, and delegation. Despite his love for research, Otto discovered that it alone could not satisfy his seemingly boundless creative drive. Later in his career he turned his attention to founding and developing the institutions which support scientific research. As a relatively young discipline, environmental chemistry was in need of this. And what a job Otto did! His long list of accomplishments includes initiating the DIOXIN Conference Series (the 32nd was held this past summer), serving for many years as Editor in Chief of Chemosphere, founding the journals Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, Umweltwissenschaften und Schadstoff-Forschung, and Environmental Science and Pollution Research, starting the section for Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology in the German Chemical Society, starting the company kometric, and serving as the founding director of the Bavarian Institute for Waste Research. In one way or another, these activities have impacted environmental chemistry researchers around the world. But for those of us who knew Otto personally, his greatest legacy is how he touched our lives with his unique combination of curiosity, creative energy, tolerance, generosity, and kindness. Find a more detailed obituary written by JP Giesy in [1]. 1. Giesy JP : Otto Hutzinger : 1932 - 2012 . Toxicol Environ Chem 2012 , 94 ( 10 ): 2060 - 2064 . http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02772248.2012.748134. (...truncated)