Dear all,
This is very sad news indeed and Jean-Luc's passing away is an enormous
loss for the crystallographic community at large. He and his team showed a
capacity for innovation that stretched over two decades, with the creation
of in situ crystallography (the idea came from Alex McPherson but it was
Jean-Luc who first made it into a production resource on his FIP beamline)
and of the CATS sample changer that adorns most MX synchrotron beamlines
today, later perfected into the versatile multi-purpose G-Rob system.
These instrumental innovations entailed very significant software
developments, and it is remarkable that with limited resources and staff
size, his FIP group was able to stand at the forefront of the early creation
of automated data processing pipelines connected to a live data collection
facility.
Jean-Luc's ground-breaking work on in-situ data collection and the high
level of automation of such experiments (using e.g. his "Crystal Listing")
was the direct precursor of today's High-Throughput Ligand Screening by MX
(e.g. the Diamond VMX-i beamline) and of Synchrotron Serial Crystallography.
A (very) short anthology of my own favourites among his papers:
https://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2001/11/00/li0408/index.html
https://journals.iucr.org/j/issues/2004/01/00/hx5003/index.html
https://journals.iucr.org/j/issues/2013/03/00/rg5033/index.html
https://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2015/08/00/jm5007/index.html
(no attempt here at being exhaustive, nor at writing an obituary ...).
Jean-Luc's energy, creative power and spirit of enterprise are a
welcome reminder of how much can be achieved by a small team of dedicated
members, even on a road typically dominated by juggernauts.
I had immense respect for him, and will miss him terribly. Most trips I
made to Grenoble were an opportunity, to which I always looked forward, to
travel early enough in the day to meet Jean-Luc for dinner and catch up with
his always original and knowledgeable views on "the state of the art" in MX.
With deepest sympathy for his family, friends and colleagues,
Gerard.
--
On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 10:19:03PM +0200, David Cobessi wrote:
> It is with a deep sadness that we learned the passing away of our dear
> colleague and friend, Dr Jean-Luc Ferrer, on April 21st in Grenoble, after a
> long struggle against his disease.
> Jean-Luc was an internationally known and highly respected scientist in
> protein crystallography.Jean-Luc had led the Synchrotron Group (GSY) at the
> IBS, a research group bridging instrumental and methodological development
> in large research infrastructures and structural biology projects. He was in
> charge of the French national (CRG) beamline FIP-BM30A at the ESRFsince
> 2001. He has always been inventive, dynamic and determined to highlight the
> advantages of synchrotron radiation for protein crystallography. Pioneer in
> the automation of crystallography beamlines, he has been the driving force
> to develop the first sample loader based on a robotic arm with the idea of
> using it directly as a goniometer. This paved the way to “in plate”
> diffraction experiments and its use for intensive ligand screening. He was
> also a co-funder of the NatX-ray company in Grenoble and San Diego and was
> strongly involved in several teaching programs and international workshops.
> Since the shutdown of the ESRF to complete its latest upgrade program,
> Jean-Luc had been in charge to rebuild the FIP beamline in order to provide
> the best service to the community, which will become BM07-FIP2.
> Jean-Luc will be forever missed and remembered.
> David Cobessi, on the behalf of the whole IBS staff and the RéNaFoBiS
> network members
>
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