40 The Israel Chemist and Chemical Engineer Issue 9 · January 2023 · Tevet 5783 History of Chemistry Articles understanding quadrupole spins, introducing Floquet theory to understanding and developing various experiments and improving resolution and sensitivity of solid-state NMR experiments and, in the last few years, providing insights into the important field of DNP in NMR. Shimon had fun doing science and was never shy of sharing his ideas and thoughts at any stage of a concept, whether published or not. For him, understanding an idea was important and the only key issue. The rest were all details for the sake of others. He was a great, active, and patient listener who put all at ease and treated others with a childlike innocence and unbridled laughter. I remember various conferences, including the Indian Magnetic Resonance Society meetings to which he came a few times, schools and workshops, and other gatherings where his infectious enthusiasmwould positively influence the students and others and even the on-lookers. He did not know that he was a rock star, but he was indeed one in the field of NMR and in science. The NMR community and I will definitely miss Shimon. It was indeed a privilege to have worked with him, known him a bit, and travelled and interacted with him. The dimensions of the matrices he worked with are most often boundless, and his memories with us also will remain so. Toda Raba Shimon. Silvia Pizzanelli I joined Shimon’s lab in 2002–2003 as a postdoc with a fellowship funded by the Center of Excellence on “the origin of ordering and functionality in meso-structured hybrid materials” of the Israel Science Foundation and the Italian National Research Council. During my PhD in Chemistry at Pisa University under the supervision of Carlo Alberto Veracini, I had studied liquid crystals using 2H NMR and often had come across papers by Zeev Luz and Shimon Vega. As I wished to further specialize in solid state NMR, my obvious choice was Shimon’s lab. I simply wrote him an e-mail, and he simply answered inviting me to the Weizmann Institute for a first meeting. My project dealt with the adsorption-desorption kinetics of tetra-alanine at the surface of the pores of an MCM-41 mesoporous material. I spent the first months in preparation of the sample. Since an aqueous solution of the peptide was to be inserted in the pores of MCM-41, I could not use the capillary condensation method, usually employed for the insertion of pure liquids. Therefore, I just added MCM-41 to the solution, but this method was fraught with potential it’s hard to express how much I’ll be missing him. Shimon did his best to promote my work and help me integrate into the NMR community. He made me meet people and talk at conferences, and in that sense, he went beyond the question he asked during my interview: he helped me build my career. He was conscious of his role as mentor, and I owe Shimon so many things that I hope the reader can measure the respect I, and others, have for him. P. K. Madhu Shimon Vega was an exceptionally kind and compassionate person and a scientist par excellence. My own association with Shimon as a post-doctoral fellow was from November, 1997, until May, 1999. However, our collaboration continued strongly with our last joint paper on heteronuclear spin decoupling that came out in 2017. We had very regular discussions on NMR and related science, life in general, a bit on politics, culture, and history all along until March 10, 2021, before he was admitted to hospital. Our last discussion was on the possibilities of locking half-integer quadrupole spins, one of his favorite topics, which he shared with his brother Lex. In our conversations in the second week of March 2021, Shimon also shared his pain in losing Prof Konstantin Ivanov (Kostya Ivanov) (who succumbed to Covid19 on March 5, 2021), a friend and colleague of both of us. Shimon, noted for some of the most insightful research in the area of magnetic resonance, both electron and nuclear magnetic resonance, has influenced professionally and to some extent personally the lives of many of us who have come in contact with him. This could be in the form of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, colleagues, course students, or listeners to one of his great talks packed with science, wit, and active involvement. His enthusiasm has been often contagious and his understanding deep enough to compel chairmen of his talk sessions to give him enough time after regular sessions to explain to the particular conference audience nuances of his theoretical ideas. These were always done with a deep flair to packed audiences. Shimon was indeed one of those rare combinations of openness to new ideas with deep-rooted knowledge on sound, pen-and-paper principles, rather than pursuing transient fashions. He belonged to that genre with a great willingness to share his knowledge with others and was a restless researcher ready to question the socalled established paradigms. His inquisitiveness had always motivated his colleagues, taking the respective research to even higher levels. Of the many contributions Shimon had made, some to highlight are in the magic-angle spinning experiments in solid-state NMR, breaking the barrier into
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU2MA==