Professor W. Alexander Van Hook (1936-2023)

It was with great sorrow that we received the news that our friend and colleague, member of the Editorial Board of “Nukleonika”, Prof. Alexander Van Hook passed away on December 18, 2023.

William Alexander Van Hook was born in Patterson, NJ on January 14, 1936. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross with degrees in Philosophy and Chemistry and from Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry. While working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he accepted a professorship in Physical Chemistry at the University of Tennessee where he had a long and distinguished career as a teacher and researcher. He was a Fulbright scholar, NAS scholar, Senate Faculty President, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society.

He has collaborated with the Institute of Chemistry and Nuclear Technology under the U.S. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Funds. The collaboration resulted in joint patents and publications on the separation of stable isotopes.

Since 2002 he was a member of the Editorial Board of “Nukleonika”. He contributed to special Issue on the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Maria Skłodowska-Curie with an important paper “Isotope effects in chemistry”.

All his friends were deeply moved by his passing.