Professor Stephan von Molnar(Figs.1 and 2),known for his groundbreaking work on magnetic semiconductors and spintronics,passed away peacefully on 17 November 2020 in Tallahassee,Florida,USA.rnStephan was born in Leipzig,eastern Germany in 1935.After a tumultuous childhood through World War II,he immig-rated to the United States in 1947.He received his Ph.D.at Uni-versity of California,Riverside in 1965.He then joined the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center as a Research Staff,and later held positions as manager and senior manager.Upon arriv-ing at IBM,he commenced a highly influential and consequen-tial study of magnetic semiconductors,which would last for nearly six decades.The effort was broadly motivated by the goal of combining magnetism with semiconductors,the two fundamental pillars of IBM's business interests in magnetic in-formation storage and semiconductor electronics.The re-search foreshadowed the emergence of the field of spin-based electronics,long before the word“spintronics”was mint-ed in 1990s.In 1994,he joined the Florida State University(FSU).In addition to leading a research group focusing on spin related physics and bionanotechnology,he served as the director of the Center for Materials Research and Techno-logy(MARTECH)for nearly 14 years.Stephan was a Distin-guished Research Professor of FSU,a fellow of the Ameri-can Physical Society,and a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S.Scientist Award.In early 2000s,he chaired a panel sponsored by several US government agen-cies,which surveyed the worldwide research efforts in spin-tronics and provided important guidance in its subsequent de-velopment.