Passing of Professor Emeritus Adi Eisenberg (1935-2022)

With heavy hearts, we announce that Professor Emeritus Adi Eisenberg (1935-2022) has passed away on January 12, 2022. A Holocaust survivor, Dr. Eisenberg has earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960, worked as a NATO post-doctoral fellow at the University of Basel with Werner Kuhn (1961-1962), and joined UCLA in 1962 as an Assistant Professor. He moved to McGill as an Associate Professor in 1967, where he was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1975 and was named Otto Maass Chair in 1992. Adi retired in 2009 but continued his NSERC-funded research long after his retirement.

Dr. Eisenberg is widely recognized as a pioneer of the field of amphiphilic block copolymers which now find numerous applications in drug delivery, materials science, and nanotechnology. During his career at McGill, he has published over 400 papers and has become the most cited chemist in the history of the Department. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received numerous awards, including Killam Research Fellowship, E. W. R. Steacie Award, Urgel Archambault Prize from ACFAS, Humboldt Research Award, and Canadian Institute of Chemistry (CIC) Medal. Nearly 50 graduate students and over 60 post-doctoral fellows have been trained in Eisenberg’s lab; many of them have become well-known polymer chemists in Canada and around the World.

Those of us who knew Adi will remember his humble personality, always encouraging towards his coworkers and his younger colleagues, and his sense of humor. We extend our condolences to his wife Chantal Zimmermann, his four children Elliot, Shoshana, Sabrina and Jonathan, and his seven grandchildren Leora, Alexa, Jake, Grant, Luca, Jordana and Abigail.