Special Issue: A tribute to the Yuri Yampolskii’s Pioneering Vision in Membrane Science and Research

Prof. Yuri Yampolskii has been one of the most well-known Membrane Scientists from the Soviet Union and Russia. He has also been contributing to opening and introducing at the international level the research activities in progress in his Country when researchers’ mobility and collaborations were not simple. Following the strategy of Nikolay Plate, Director of the A.V. Topchiev Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Head of the Membrane Center in this Institute, Yuri Yampolskii contributed significantly to the organization of the first successful international membrane conference in the Soviet Union in 1989, in the ancient Russian town Suzdal, and to the first Summer School of European Membrane Society in Moscow, in 1991. His scientific contributions are well recognized internationally in all his interesting publications. They are well summarized in his books Materials Science of Membranes for Gas and Vapor Separation, with Benny Freeman and Ingo Pinnau as co-editors, Membrane Gas Separation, co-edited with Benny Freeman, and Membrane Materials for Gas and Separation: Synthesis and Application of Silicon-Containing Polymers, with Eugene Finkelshtein, all published by Wiley, and Polymeric Gas Separation Membranes co-edited with Don R. Paul by CRC Press. He has successfully introduced various membrane researchers in his Country, promoting joint research projects, researcher mobility, and exchanges. One of us (E.D.) had the fortune to have Yuri guiding him in various Russian cities traveling, for example, by night from Moscow to Saint Petersburg (Leningrad at that time), and learning about the real Russian lifestyle, including drinking and eating in his beautiful warm house. Yuri reciprocated. He frequently visited the Institute on Membrane Technology at Rende, Italy, transferring his interest in various membrane activities to the younger Italian and foreign students present in our laboratories and finding the time for heavily harvesting olives from olive trees of one of us (E.D.). Yuri’s overall successful human and scientific life will leave a very important memory for all of us, particularly for the younger ones who will be inspired by his positive examples in Life and Science.