Published: 31 July 2012

VERITAS and the entire VHE community were saddened by the loss of Alex "Sasha" Konopelko on August 10, 2012. Sasha was one of the key investigators in the HEGRA collaboration early in his career. He contributed, through his skills simulating air showers and their detection by air Cherenkov telescopes, to the design of the HEGRA system. He also was a pioneer in the stereo analysis techniques that ultimately led to the third generation of VHE telescope arrays. The success of the HEGRA system and the validation of the stereoscopic technique was in large part due to Sasha's insightful contributions. Sasha took his talents to the HESS collaboration and subsequently to the VERITAS collaboration where the analysis methods he helped develop have become the backbone of the field. The success of the field of ground based gamma-ray astronomy over the past decade owes no small measure of thanks to Sasha. Sasha was most recently a member of the VERITAS collaboration and also the CTA-US effort. His colleagues in those collaborations have been the most recent beneficiaries of his talent and expertise in the field of VHE gamma-ray astronomy. Sasha's talents and skills will be missed by all and his infectious sense of humor will be memories we will all cherish.

-  John P. Finley, Department of Physics, Purdue University