No doubt many of you have heard about the recent shootings at Virginia Tech. What you may not have heard is that one of the victims, a professor and internationally-known researcher in aerodynamics, died holding off the gunman while his students escaped through the window. Dr. Librescu was an author of several books (one of which came out just last year) and a joint-editor of 7 journals, as well as the winner of over a dozen awards (his faculty webpage.) He was also a holocaust survivor.
Obviously, it's hard to cope with any event like this, but as it happened at a technical college, yesterday hits even closer to home for the scientific community. Dr. Librescu was just one of the several scientists who died, after having contributed so much to the fields they loved -- not to mention their students, who hadn't even begun their careers and now will never fulfill the roles they would've otherwise come to play in the rest of our lives. Given how small the academic world is (and how easy it was to find that with Google), most likely some of us would've been influenced by them, both academically and personally: when so many bright people are lost, it reaches every one of us, if only because of what doesn't happen as a result.
http://community.livejournal.com/_scientists_/911355.html |
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