Dr. Fred (Kwok-Yung) Lo, Academician and former Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), passed away on December 16 at the age of 69. Dr. Lo was a distinguished astronomer and Director Emeritus of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the largest and most powerful radio astronomy observatory in the world.
　　Academician Lo specialized in astrophysics and radio astronomy. He is well-known for his work on the Intergalactic Hydrogen Survey, Circumnuclear Maser (which can measure the mass of black holes) and using CO as the medium to explore distribution of hydrogen in the outer galaxy by millimeter interferometry.
　　Dr. Lo planned and arranged the establishment of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics with colleagues such as Academicians Typhoon Lee, Paul Ho and Frank Shu, and Dr. Yuan Chi in the early 1990s and became the third director of the institute in 1997. Dr. Lo was instrumental in the construction and start-up of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a ground-based telescope operation run by an international collaboration in northern Chile. He also put into practice the first and only apparatus to research cosmology, the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy (AMiBA) and Taiwan American Occultation Survey (TAOS).
　　Dr. Lo received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award twice, in 1994 and 2012, respectively. He was elected an Academician of Academia Sinica in 1998, a Fellow of Chinese Physical Society in 2000 and a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006.
　　Dr. Lo earned his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. After conducting postdoctoral research at Caltech, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986. When he returned to Taiwan in 1997 he became a Distinguished Research Fellow and a Professor at National Taiwan University in addition to his appointment as ASIAA director. In 2002, Dr. Lo returned to the US to become Director and Distinguished Astronomer of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory until his retirement in 2012.