It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Olga Borisovna Igonkina, Senior Researcher at Nikhef, and professor by extraordinary appointment at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Olga joined the ATLAS Collaboration in 2006 via the University of Oregon and moved to Nikhef in 2008. In ATLAS she has been a key member of the trigger group since Run 1 where she contributed to many activities with great ideas and enthusiasm: menu coordinator, tau trigger coordinator, B physics and LS trigger coordinator. She was so proud of the L1 topological trigger commissioning success, for which she also received an ATLAS outstanding achievement award in 2018. Physics-wise her passion was lepton flavour violation, in particular in tau decays, which already started well before when she joined BaBar in 2002. 

At Nikhef her LFV research accelerated thanks to numerous personal grants and she supervised many PhD students and postdocs on this topic. Olga was an enthusiastic teacher and also very active in outreach activities with masterclasses and at Open Days at Nikhef. Recently she organised The 15th International Workshop on Tau Lepton Physics in Amsterdam.

Olga was a great scientist with a memorably strong work ethos. Until the very last moment she gave little room for her illness to affect her work. She will be missed dearly, inside and outside Nikhef.

Her colleagues and friends