VALE: Ian Michael,13 September 1957–24 April 2023

Ian Michael, founding publisher of NIR news and the Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy, died in April 2023.

After taking a degree in Zoology at St Andrew’s University in Scotland, Ian joined the publishers Heyden and Son in London, where he worked on European Spectroscopy News and European Chromatography News. When these titles were sold to Wiley, in 1982, Ian went with them, and was appointed Chief Publisher of Spectroscopy World and European Spectroscopy News. He left Wiley in 1989, and soon afterwards set up an independent company, IM Publications, producing what had now become Spectroscopy Europe. Soon after this, Ian formed a partnership with Tony Davies to set up NIR news, the official newsletter of ICNIRS. The Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy followed, with Tony Davies as the first editor, and the rest is history.

Ian published NIR news from 1990 and JNIRS from 1993 until these titles were sold to Sage Publications in 2016, and the Journal of Spectral Imaging from 2010. During this time, he was a regular attendee at the international conferences and will be known personally by many readers of NIR news. I believe he enjoyed working with the NIR community as much as we enjoyed having him around.

He was a delight to work with: a gentle and caring person who was tolerant of tardy authors and anxious editors with space to fill before an upcoming deadline! Ian always had a ready smile (captured in the photo, along with two of his interests – sailing and fishing) and a contagious laugh (Figure 1). All who visited Ian at his home/office will have experienced his and Katie’s hospitality which left nothing to be desired.

Figure 1.

Ian enjoying his favourite pastimes – sailing and fishing.

The NIR community owes an enormous debt to Ian and to Tony Davies for what they began in the 1990s. It is easy to say, as many of us did “it would be good to have a journal for NIR”, it is quite another thing to actually set one up from scratch and to make a success of it. Tony, happily, is still with us. With typical generosity, he insists (see below) that Ian should take the credit for being brave enough to embark on this enterprise. Ian we have lost far too early. He would not want us to be sad – the closing music at his funeral service was “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” – words in keeping with the way he would want us to remember him but he would, I am sure, want to be remembered. The publications he brought into being will keep his memory alive.

Tom Fearn, Graeme Batten, Gerry Downey

Tony Davies writes:

I first met Ian at a meeting at the Food Research Institute (FRI) in Norwich, which I had arranged for Peter Griffiths and several FRI colleagues who were also spectroscopists to speak. The next time was at a conference in Cambridge, and I learnt that he and Harry Willis were about to launch a new publication (Spectroscopy World). He rang me a few weeks later and told me that they wanted to have a column concerned with “Chemometrics”. I was enthusiastic and asked, “Who are you going to get to write it?”. His reply “Why am I calling you”? So, I said “No, I am not a chemometrician.” “We want you because you are so keen on it”; it became the Tony Davies column.

We began regular discussions and one day Ian said, “We ought to start a newsletter for NIR.” I wasn’t keen because I had an agreement with Bill Fateley for an occasional NIR newsletter in Applied Spectroscopy, but Ian persuaded me that NOW would be timely! We launched NIR News and recruited a team of regional and subject editors. We held our first editors meeting in Aberdeen during NIR-91. Ian suggested it was time to think about an NIR journal, but this fell on deaf ears. “It is too soon and we are only just getting success in persuading the journals we expect to publish in to accept our papers”. I agreed with them, and Ian accepted it. However, at our meeting during NIR-94 in Australia, the mood was quite different. When Ian mentioned an NIR journal, no one spoke against it and Tormod Næs said “I will submit the first paper”, and he did!

This was the start of a productive and enjoyable collaboration but I hope I have persuaded everyone that Ian was, by far, the most important initiator.