Severin Amelinckx was born on October 30, 1922, in Willebroek, Belgium. Since 1930 he lived in Antwerp where he went to high school from 1934 till 1940 at the Royal Atheneum of Berchem. From 1940 till 1944 he finished his licence studies (now Master’s) in mathematics plus a candidacy (now Bachelor) in physics at the State University of Ghent. After the war he was a high school teacher for a few years at different Athenea in the Antwerp district and in 1948 he became the first scientific collaborator of Prof. Dekeyser in Ghent. In 1951 he completed his studies in physics and in 1952 he obtained his Ph.D. in physics entitled “Observations concerning spiral growth of carborundum crystals”. In 1955 he obtained his Habilitation with the work entitled “Microscopic and interferometric study of crystal surfaces related with the theory of dislocations”.

After a few post-doctoral research periods in Groningen, London and Illinois he became lecturer and later extra-ordinary professor at the State University of Ghent. From the start of the State University Centre of Antwerp (RUCA) in 1965 he became extra-ordinary professor at this institute. He was responsible for courses as “General Physics” and more specialised themes such as “Radiation Damage in Materials” and “Physics of Materials”. At the same University he initiated the “Centre for High Tension Electron Microscopy”. Later he also became professor at the Free University of Brussels and held several teaching chairs at universities abroad including Carnegie Mellon Institute of Technology, Stanford University and La Sorbonne.

In the mean time, in 1959 he became president of the department of Solid State Physics of the “Research Centre for Nuclear Energy” in Mol, Belgium. In 1963 he was appointed Assistent Director General of the Nuclear Centre and in 1975 Director General, which he stayd till his retirement in 1987.

Since 1981 he was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Fine Arts and Literature of Belgium and in 1993 he was governer-president of the Class of Sciences of this Academy. In 1997 he became honorable member of this Academy. He was also a member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, the Royal Dutch Academy for Sciences and the Academia Europea in London. He was Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece, holder of the Belgian Franqui Chair and of several other scientific prices in Belgium and abroad.

Severin Amelinckx was member of different international scientific societies, among which the “International Union of Crystallography”. He also was editor or member of the editorial board of about twenty international scientific journals covering a wide span of scientific topics: examples are Physica Status Solidi, Materials Research Bulletin, Juornal of Materials Science, Solid State Communications, Journal of Solid State Chemistry, International Journal for Crystal Growth, Ultramicroscopy, Radiation Effects, Applied Physics, Crystal Lattice Defects, Thin Films and Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Together with his co-workers, he has published more than 1.000 scientific publications and several books which received more than 10.000 referals.

His scientific accomplishments are impossible to describe in a few sentences. He started his carrier with the study of dislocations, at the time still with optical microscopy. Later he stood at the cradle of the development and application of the technique of electron microscopy – diffraction as well as imaging – in materials science, the latter afterwards extended to atomic resolution. He applied this technique to the study of a large diversity of materials such as semiconductors, alloys, dichalcogenides, ceramics, quasicrystals, superconductors, buckyballs, nanotubes, etc. He had a special gift to turn complex diffraction patterns as well as conventional and high resolution electron images into simple or less simple models of structures or defects, always with the aim of better describing and understanding matter. Till a few years ago he still regularly visited the lab he started and even after that he still asked us to send him our most recently published papers.

In the name of his past and present co-workers we would like to add that it has not only been a great honour to have been able to work together with “Mister Amelinckx”, as that is how we called him at the lab, but also a great pleasure: his inspiring enthousiasm for science, his phenomenous memory, knowledge and ability to reason together with his gentle character resulted in working with him to be a real treat. The “Centre for High Tension Electron Microscopy” that he started at what is now the University of Antwerp and that later was renamed into “Electron Microscopy for Materials Science”, also known as EMAT, now hosts 6 TEMs, 1 SEM, 1 FIB and 1 X-ray diffractometer and has about 45 co-workers.

Prof. Amelinckx passed away at the St. Elizabeth hospital in Antwerp on February 22, 2007.

Gustaaf Van Tendeloo
Dirk Van Dyck
Dominique Schryvers
Jozef Van Landuyt
The EMAT team