TY - JOUR T1 - In memoriam: Professor Philip H. Quanjer JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J DO - 10.1183/13993003.01660-2017 VL - 50 IS - 3 SP - 1701660 AU - Janet Stocks AU - Irene Steenbruggen Y1 - 2017/09/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/50/3/1701660.abstract N2 - A great sense of loss and sadness marked the recent death of Philip Quanjer, who passed away peacefully at his home in Nijverdal, the Netherlands on July 26, 2017 after a long and courageous battle against cancer, during which he defied all odds in order to complete the tasks he had set himself. Philip was a highly respected member of the global respiratory community, who devoted his life to understanding and describing lung health, remaining highly active in his field up to a few weeks before his death. Indeed, after “retiring” in 1997, he went on to publish a further 90 papers, an astonishing 55 of which being published during the last five years of his life. His efforts since the 1980s to improve the standard of lung function testing and develop more reliable reference values with which to interpret the results of such tests have won him international acclaim and immense respect and admiration from the global respiratory community. Such developments were essential in order to improve early detection of respiratory disease, irrespective of age, sex or ethnic background, and to clarify what factors impact negatively on lung development.Philip was born on September 12, 1936 in Pontianak (Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia) and spent his formative years in a Japanese concentration camp (where he learnt to swim in crocodile infested rivers!) until liberation in 1945. His first two years of formal education, which did not commence until he was nine years of age, were spent in Thailand and Indonesia before his family returned to the Netherlands in 1948. Philip met the love of his life and future wife, Else Meijerink, while they were both high school students. They married in 1960, while he was still a student at Groningen University medical school (1955–1963), had four children (two sons … ER -