January 15, 2010 (HE38).  Praveen Chaudhari, the prominent science manager and scientist, long time the IBM Vice-President of Science and lately Director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, prematurely passed away in the night of 12 January 2010.  During his long tenure at IBM, he contributed in a major way to superconductivity.

Of his many direct contributions, the seminal and most prominent one is the systematic investigation of critical current dependence upon the grain boundary angle in rare earth cuprates (YBCO). This resulted in thus far the most reliable and broadly used technology of high-Tc Josephson junctions used in SQUIDs, HTS voltage standards, etc.  Furthermore, the bicrystal work provided foundation for the experimental confirmation and investigations of d-wave pairing in cuprates. It also led to the development of the HTS coated conductor technology. Also, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), he supported superconducting materials research and participated in it.  The summary of his recent results and thoughts on the grain boundaries in cuprates is given in his plenary EUCAS 2009 talk pre-published in our Issue 11 (to appear in Superconductor Science and Technology 2010).  For his achievements, Chaudhari has been honored with a number of awards.  He was an APS Fellow and member of the US National Academy of Engineering.  We reproduce his photo dating a few years back.