Obituary of Dr. Robert C. Ripley

It is with heavy hearts to announce that Dr. Robert Ripley passed away after a brief illness on March 20, 2024, surrounded by his family at the Foothills Medical Center, Calgary, Canada. He was 48 years old.

Robert Ripley received his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering at University of Waterloo. He worked on explosion and fluid dynamics from 2002 to 2019 at Martec Limited which later merged into Lloyd's Register. In 2019 he joined Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), Suffield Research Centre. As a lead scientist, Dr. Ripley specialized in shock wave, detonation, explosion and related structure response, more specifically in multiphase flow, heterogeneous detonation and enhanced blast effects in military and urban environments. His talent and profound expertise originated as numerical modeling and simulation and were later extended to large-scale experiments especially since joining DRDC. His scientific contributions were recorded in more than 140 refereed open literature of journal and proceedings papers, as well as in the numerous internal reports.

Obituary of Dr. Robert C. Ripley

Dr. Ripley was a Member of the MABS Executive Committee and had been involved with the MABS community for 20 years, starting with his first presentation at the 18^th MABS, Bad Reichenhall, Germany in 2004. He served to review MABS abstracts and papers and session chairs for various MABS conferences. Dr. Ripley chaired the 24^th MABS at Halifax, Canada in 2016. Many of us have fond memories of the Halifax MABS in both academic and social activities, with lovely talking, debating, chatting, joking and personal touch.

Our words cannot take away the pain of suddenly losing Dr. Ripley at his bright age. He will be fondly remembered as a brilliant scientist, an inspiring mentor, a passionate MABS promoter, and first of all an open-mind, generous, consistent, resilient, and compassionate person, for which many people would like to work with him together. As his influence in our life continues, Dr. Ripley will stay in our hearts and minds forever. May his soul rest in peace.