Dear ECHA Community, Dear Friends!
It is my sad duty to inform you that the Honorary President of ECHA, Franz Mönks has passed away on March 10th at 4.10 am in peace. He had suffered from a severe gland inflammation which has led to a serious condition in the last few months. He passed his 87th birthday in April 2019. He obtained his PhD in Bonn in 1966 about the future vision of adolescents. From 1967 to 1988 he was professor of developmental psychology at Radboud University in Nijmegen. Since 1988 he has held the first chair in Psychology and Pedagogy of the Gifted Child in Europe. From 1973 to 1978, he was also professor of developmental psychology at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He was visiting professor in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Lima, Bandung, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Lexington (Kentucky), Debrecen (Hungary), Hefei and Shanghai (China). In 1997 he retired as an emeritus professor of Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). He became the Honorary Professor and Doctor of many universities. In 1989 he became vice president of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children (WCGTC). In that position, he organized the ninth World Congress on giftedness in The Hague in 1991. In 1992, he resigned from that position to become President of the European Council for High Ability (ECHA). He was re-elected altogether three times for a four-year period. In this position he founded a globally recognized training in 1992: Specialist in Gifted Education. In 1994, the first five diplomas were awarded during the ECHA Congress in Nijmegen. There are now several thousand teachers who have successfully completed this training. Most of them in Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, but also in Sweden, Chile and Peru. He was the recipient of the Kelemen László Award of the Hungarian Association of Psychology (2000); as well as the Lifetime Achievement Awards of the Hungarian Talent Support Organization (2012) and MENSA International (2012). One of the last public occasions he participated was the 1st Thematic Conference of ECHA in Dubrovnik in 2019, Croatia where he became the Honorary President of ECHA and received its Certificate. That was a moment of well-deserved honour for Franz’s many-decade long service for ECHA. I am truly glad that the ECHA community was able to give this to Him. We will miss Franz. He contributed a lot to our community and had personal friendship with many-many members in ECHA. Please keep Franz in your best memory, and think about those who were close to Him sharing their loss, pain and suffer.
Peter Csermely, president of ECHA
