It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Professor Cees Bastiaansen on the 15 October 2026. Cees (also known as Kees) joined SEMS at Queen Mary as a part-time professor in 2008. He was a highly valued colleague, who collaborated extensively with many of us and taught brilliantly. When Cees entered the room, the energy levels went up, and you knew that new ideas and interpretations were sure to develop. Many of us benefitted from these inspirational moments.

Cees supervised several successful Queen Mary PhD students and was a co-investigator on many grants with Queen Mary colleagues. Cees collaborated widely but also extensively producing significant high impact research papers with many of us including most notably Ton Peijs, Emiliano Bilotti, Han Zhang, Lorenzo Botto, Martin Heeney, Dimitrios Papageorgiou and Nicola Pugno. Cees officially retired in 2021 but remained on as a Visiting Professor.

Throughout his time at QM, Cees also co-worked at Eindhoven University. Prior to this he started his academic career as an academic at ETH Zurich having previously worked in industry for DSM as a project manager. His research interests covered processing and structure-property relationships of polymers with an emphasis on aligned, oriented systems such as high-performance fibres. He worked extensively on devices that adopted the functional properties of these systems for sensors, actuators and smart windows. He collaborated with many industrial partners through various multi-partner projects, including several EU, UK and NL government funded projects.

Cees wrote more than 200 peer reviewed papers, was a co-inventor of more than 80 international patents and was a co-founder of more than 7 start-up companies. Cees was also a science and technology advisor at multinationals, small and medium sized enterprises and start-ups.

Cees was awarded with the Most Innovative Scientist of The Netherlands Award (NL), the Science and Innovation Award of the Dutch Polymer Institute (NL) and the Swinburne Medal from the IOM3 in the UK in 2018. The last award recognises people who have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and knowledge of any field related to polymers. This award is the most prestigious polymer industry award in the UK. As part of the award Cees presented the Swinburne lecture on “Static & Responsive Chain-Extended Macromolecules”.

There are undoubtedly many former students and colleagues who have much to thank Cees for and who like us will be very sorry to hear this sad news. Our thoughts at Queen Mary are with Cees's wife, Yvonne and his many friends and family.

There is a condolence card on Meihong’s desk that will be posted to Cees’ family in early November. You can either send Meihong a personal message to include in the card or you can include it yourself in person.