With sadness we report that Kuppusami Govindaraju, or Raj as he was universally known by his scientific colleagues in France and across the World, passed away in January this year. Raj was arguably – and certainly in the European sphere – the pre-eminent figure in developing geoanalysis as a recognisable scientific discipline and in particular pioneering methods for the production and characterisation of geological reference materials.
Over a four-decade career in geoanalytical science he was significantly involved with, or was responsible for, the running of collaborative scientific networks, such as the Association National de la Recherche Technique (ANRT) and the Groupe International de Travail-International Working Group (GIT-IWG), as well as being instrumental in establishing and developing the Service National d’Analyse des Roches et Mineraux (SARM) for the CNRS at the Centre de Recherche Petrographiques et Geochimiques (CRPG), Nancy, after being the group leader of the spectrochemistry laboratory since 1958.
Stemming from these activities Raj also conceived the idea of founding this journal (which he called Geostandards Newsletter) to support the needs of the developing field of geoanalysis – with particular focus on publishing quantitative information on reference materials, or geochemical reference samples as he early termed them. Indeed, his lasting legacy is likely to be the establishment of Geostandards Newsletter (now published as GGR) as the premier publication resource for geoanalytical developments, an achievement of which he was likely to be most proud.