Death of Emmanuel Rosencher: one year already

Despite having joined Onera only a few weeks ago, I feel how intact the memory of the man who placed his scientific excellence and incredible enthusiasm at the service of our organization remains a year later. 

This is why I feel that it is important to pay tribute to the great scientist and man that he was.

It is difficult to briefly summarize the scientific career of an outstanding researcher. He was a demanding and ambitious scientific director who worked tirelessly for Onera’s scientific outreach. He had great dreams for Onera, always seeking new challenges, taking with him engineers, researchers and PhD students to whom he knew so well how to communicate his enthusiasm. All of the evidence I have heard, both from inside and outside Onera, points towards this.

He seems to have left lasting impressions as from his arrival at Onera in 1998 as Head of the Diagnostics, Optics and Plasma Unit within the Physics and Instrumentation Department. The Physics branch still bears the mark of the man who was its director from 2003 to 2010.

Those who knew him have described him to me as a free spirit, open and with an insatiable curiosity. Everything triggered his appetite to learn, understand and explain. He lived his life and career briskly, eager to make science advance.

His peers, his colleagues, his students and the aerospace community unanimously miss him. They hold onto the memory of an attentive, accessible man with a caustic sense of humour and with beautiful human qualities.

I realise how great a loss his death has been for all of Onera. I wanted, on this day of remembrance, to gather those who knew him and especially his family, whom I want to remind about how grateful Onera is for everything that Emmanuel Rosencher contributed to it. 

Bruno Sainjon

Chairman and CEO of ONERA

 

Emmanuel Rosencher, on the occasion of his jubilee at the École Polytechnique,  on the 24^th of May 2011 "30 years of quantum engineering applied to optics"