The astronomical community was shocked and saddened by the news that Jean-Pierre Macquart passed away recently. J-P, an Associate Professor at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, started his career at the University of Sydney and was a postdoc at the Kapteyn Institute in the Netherlands, and a US National Radio Astronomy Observatory Jansky Fellow at Caltech. J-P had a long association with the Australia Telescope National Facility, collaborating with a number of ATNF staff, and was co-Principal Investigator of the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transient (CRAFT) Survey. The seminal CRAFT paper reporting the first measurement of the missing cosmic baryons via the observed dispersion of Fast Radio Bursts, led by J-P, had been published in Nature just days before he passed away.

J-P was an exceptional scientist, and the breadth of his interests can be gauged by the titles of his papers, including Nanoarcsecond Single-Dish Imaging of the Vela Pulsar , Strong, Variable Circular Polarization in PKS 1519-273 , Microarcsecond Radio Imaging using Earth-Orbit Synthesis , Scattering of gravitational radiation. Second order moments of the wave amplitude , The Rotation Measure and 3.5 Millimeter Polarization of Sagittarius A* , and Fast radio burst event rate counts – I. Interpreting the observations . J-P had an extensive network of colleagues and collaborators, and the astronomical community has lost a great scientist and a dear friend. (Image credit: Keith Bannister)