Christer Larsson, Professor of Microbial Physiology at SysBio, passed away on October 12th 2021.
Christer was as a true scientist, a supportive mentor to younger colleagues, an inspiring teacher and an accomplished manager who led by example.
As a scientist, Christer worked on yeast physiology. During his postdoc at EPFL, he worked on calorimetry of yeast fermentation. This became his long-term passion, and in this area, he made several seminal contributions. Later Christer broadened his research on yeast, and many of his scientific contributions stands out as pillars for our current knowledge of yeast metabolism and physiology.
As a mentor and teacher, Christer inspired and trained many generations of students and young scientists at Chalmers. He will be remembered as a knowledgeable and kind teacher, who was always prepared to listen and to help.
As a manager, Christer was one of the founding fathers of our BIO department and he served as deputy head of department for many years. In this role, he will mostly be remembered by his faculty colleagues who all went to him with various problems. Christer always had a solution and it usually came garnished with a spark of Christer’s unique humor.
During the past weeks, we all gathered our memories of Christer and talked about his legacy at SysBio. There is one thing that everyone said: Christer was the ultimate team player. He did not seek power or glory for himself. He was happy when the team SysBio scored.
To all of us at SysBio, Christer was a kind and helpful colleague, a trusted advisor, and to many of us he was a friend. He will always be remembered, and we will keep alive the team spirit that he promoted.
