In Memoriam: Femke Olyslager

Prof. Femke Olyslager passed away unexpectedly on January 28, 2009. Prof. Olyslager was born in 1966. She received the MS degree in 1989 and the PhD degree in 1993, both in Electrical Engineering from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. She was a full professor of Electromagnetics at Ghent University. She was a brilliant scientist who made outstanding contributions to the fields of computational and theoretical electromagnetics. She authored or coauthored approximately 300 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. She coauthored Electromagnetic and Circuit Modeling of Multiconductor Transmission Lines (Oxford University Press, 1993), and authored Electromagnetic Waveguides and Transmission Lines (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Prof. Olyslager had been the Assistant Secretary General of URSI since 2002. She was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and an Associate Editor of Radio Science. In 1994, she became a laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature and Fine Arts of Belgium. She received the 1995 IEEE Microwave Prize for the best paper published in the 1993 IEEE Transactions On Microwave Theory and Techniques, and the 2000 Best Transactions Paper Award for the best paper published in the 1999 IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility. In 2002, she received the Issac Koga Gold Medal from URSI, “In recognition of her work on theoretical and numerical electromagnetics (in particular in the field of boundary integral equations, waveguides, and bianisotropic media).” In 2004, she became a laureate of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. She was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2005 “for contributions to theoretical and computational electromagnetics.”

Throughout her career, she showed a commitment to URSI. She will be deeply missed by the radio science community. The Department of Information Technology and its Electromagnetics group, her many PhD students to whom she was an inspiring example, and the URSI Board and Secretariat are deeply saddened by this loss of a dear friend and colleague.