Fons van de Vijver. Obituary

The world cross-cultural psychology and the International Laboratory for Socio-Cultural Research have suffered a heavy and irreparable loss: Fons van de Vijver, an outstanding psychologist, methodologist, author of more than 500 publications, mainly in the field of cross-cultural psychology, died suddenly at the age of 67 His main research topics included psychological acculturation and multiculturalism, cognitive similarities and differences, bias and equivalence, response styles, translations and adaptations. He is one of the most frequently cited cross-cultural psychologists in Europe.

Fons van de Vijver received deserved recognition from his colleagues and was the President of several professional associations:
- International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology
- International Association for Applied Psychology,
- European Association for Psychological Assessment

In 2013 he was awarded the International prize of American Psychological Association (for his contribution to international cooperation and development of knowledge in the field of psychology), and in 2014-the winner of the IAAP Fellows Award (International Association for Applied Psychology for contribution to applied psychology) and Sindbad prize of the Dutch Psychological Association (for contribution to intercultural psychology). He was a professor at the University of Tilburg, Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland (Australia), and Northwestern University of South Africa, and a consultant on international projects TALIS, PISA, and Starting Strong Survey.

As a member of IL SCR Fons van de Vijver worked since 2018, although our cooperation with him already has a long history. Fons paid great attention to the development of cross-cultural psychology in Russia, prepared and published with the laboratory staff articles in high-ranking journals, lectured at our master's program "Applied social psychology", for the last few years was a permanent teacher at our Summer schools. It is hard to imagine more responsive, warm and enthusiastic person as he was.

We were looking forward to his arrival in Moscow for our Summer school in June 2019 and were preparing to discuss our plans and results with him…

We will always remember him this way: open, cheerful, bright...

Head of ILSCR,
Tenured Professor of HSE
N. Lebedeva