Piet Leclercq (1942–2000)

It is with deepest regret that I have to report the death of Dr. Piet Leclercq, associate professor of the Eindhoven University of Technology. He was one of the most prominent European specialists in gas chromatography – mass spectrometry during the last decades. On 22 March 2000 he lost after an almost five months struggle against an unconquerable disease. I got acquainted with Piet in 1967, when preparing my Ph.D. thesis and Piet contributed as a MSc. (Ir) student a chapter to my final dissertation. In 1975 he obtained the Ph.D. degree from the Eindhoven University on a thesis entitled “Some applications of mass spectrometry in biochemistry” with Aloys Keulemans and Evan Horning as supervisors. Piet Leclercq got international reputation in the seventies by his method oriented work on hyphenating glass capillary columns and positive ion chemical ionization. Together we published numerous papers and review articles on fast gas chromatography and fast GC-mass spectrometry. In recent years he mainly applied GC-MS for mapping the biodiversity of plants. In cooperation with scientists from Vietnam, India, Peru and Benin essential oils from various plants have been analysed resulting in over eighty articles.