Dear friends,

It is with profound sorrow that we must announce the death of our close colleague and friend Mike Macon. Mike died on Thursday, March 15th in the midst of a heroic battle with lymphoma due to secondary complications of his treatment.

Mike had worked in the area of speech synthesis for only half a decade, completing his Ph.D. in 1996. Nevertheless, in these very few years, he has had a phenomenal impact on the field, both by his scientific contributions, his activities in national and international organizations, and his work as a teacher and colleague at OGI's Center for Spoken Language Understanding. The reason for this impact was an exceptional combination of creativity, ability to deliver, and, most importantly, personality.

Mike focused on signal processing algorithms for speech modification, which is a critical area for the next generation of speech synthesis systems. His creative work was rewarded by the prestigious NSF Career Development Award in 1999, as well as by several research grants and honors. When you worked closely with him, you would be delighted by the sense he exuded that one can do anything as long as one tries, focuses, plans, and gets cheerfully excited when meeting new obstacles.

Mike's death is an enormous loss that fills us all with profound grief.

Jan P. H. van Santen
Center for Spoken Language Understanding
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology
vansanten@ece.ogi.edu