Last Sunday, our Friend and Colleague Ali Mahmoodi passed away while in Toulouse.
Born in 58, he has been a close collaborator of our SMOS team since the very early days, when Array Systems was selected to make the level 2 soil moisture and vegetation opacity processor for ESA. He led the project very successfully and on the day of SMOS first image (November 17th 2009) the processor was working as smoothly as could be imagined. Until the end of Array Systems, he was a very close collaborator. And he remained so afterwords. He even spent time at CESBIO working on new SMOS projects for several years. He then went back to Canada where he taught at York University (and was very much appreciated by his students). After a while, he came back to science and remote sensing, working remotely with Magellium on another very interesting project: FLEX.
It is in this context that he came regularly in Toulouse and we had the opportunity to meet him and enjoy his company.
Ali was not only an outstanding professional, he was gifted with a wonderful personality. I, but can safely assume, we all, appreciated him a lot and we all have very fond memories of moments spent with him discussing science, politics, poetry, books and film, history and music and whatever around a meal he cooked or around a beer in the mountain or in a bar listening to live music (from Grossman to George and the Dragon) or sailing on a boat as he was an accomplished crewmate and a pleasure to sail with.
He will be missed .
