Carlos Matos Ferreira (1948-2014)
Professor Carlos Matos Ferreira passed away unexpectedly on 27 December 2014 in Lisbon. He was a Full Professor at the Department of Physics of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) since 1979.
He was President of IST from 2001 to 2009 and founder of the Gas Discharges and Gaseous Electronics group at Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear (IPFN), IST, as well as Director of the APPLAuSE Doctoral Programme in Plasma Science and Engineering with IPFN/IST.
He was a member of the Academia Europaea, elected in 2002, and Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator, a decoration awarded by the President of the Portuguese Republic in 2005. He was awarded a prize Stimulus to Excellence in Research by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia in 2004.
He graduated in Electrical Engineering from IST (1971), received a doctorate in physics at the University of Paris XI - Orsay (1976), with the grade Très Honorable, and earned the title of Agregado in Physics at IST (1979).
His scientific work was in field of low-temperature plasmas (LTP), mainly on discharges and electronics in gases, kinetic theory and atomic and molecular physics in plasmas. He devoted many years of his research career to the study of the electron Boltzmann equation and to the theoretical formulation describing the structure of surface-wave-sustained plasmas.
He was an internationally renowned plasma physicist. He authored two books and published more than 400 papers in international journals, as book-chapters published by international publishers and as articles in the proceedings of international conferences with refereeing.
He supervised more than 20 research programs of undergraduate and graduate students (post-doctoral, doctoral and master), at the national and international levels. With about 3000 current citations, his work will continue to have an important impact in the LTP community.
Professor Matos Ferreira was, for many years, in charge of lecturing the MSc course on Plasma Physics and Technology, in the scope of IST's Master in Engineering Physics. His faculty colleagues, and particularly those from the field of Plasma Physics, Lasers and Nuclear Fusion, will remember and perpetuate the values that guided his activity as an academician, a scientist and a mentor.
He will be greatly missed by us all.
Luís L. Alves and Luís O. Silva
