Obituary of Nikolay Uraltsev (1957-2013)

We, the staff of the elementary particle physics group at Siegen University, suffer from the loss of our friend and colleague Nikolay Uraltsev who suddenly and unexpectedly passed away on Ash Wednesday. We lost not only an extraordinary and worldwide renowned expert in particle physics, we also lost a friend who shaped the academic life of our group. After the four years he spent in Siegen, he was one of the pillars of our group. ‘Kolya’ Uraltsev received his academic training in St. Petersburg, where he also qualified as a professor. Most of his academic life can be described as a continuing journey between various institutions: he was an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, a researcher and professor at the University of Minneapolis in Minnesota, a scientist at CERN and at the Technion in Haifa and a senior scientist at Milan and Turin, before he joined at the particle theory group at the University of Siegen in 2008. He was a world renowned expert in the field of flavour physics and its phenomenological applications. In particular, he must be regarded as one of the founding fathers of the modern description of heavy quark physics; his work on the heavy quark expansion has revolutionized the description of processes with heavy quarks. His early death is a noticable loss for theoretical particle physics and the flavour physics community. Thomas Mannel for the TP1 Staff