Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Medicine, François Herrmann died accidentally just a few months after his retirement. This premature loss deeply affects all those who had the privilege of working with him.

Having graduated in medicine in Geneva in 1985 and obtained his doctorate in 1987, he quickly turned to medical informatics and epidemiology. A post-doctoral stay at Harvard Medical School also enabled him to obtain a Master's in Public Health (MPH). Upon his return to Geneva, he developed clinical and research activities within the Department of Rehabilitation and Geriatrics at HUG, focusing on geriatrics, quality of care, and epidemiology. His work thus focused on cognition, longevity, centenarians, mortality, and environmental determinants, particularly climatic. Appointed Associate Professor in 2013 then Full Professor in 2020, he also served as Academic Director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Geriatrics from 2021 to 2025 until his retirement last October.

Author of highly original research, his methodological and statistical expertise helped structure and strengthen the design and analysis of countless clinical studies. He was one of the few capable of combining with such precision causal reasoning, analytical robustness, and clinical common sense. But beyond his scientific contributions, his colleagues especially remember his talent for teaching. He had the gift of making the most demanding methods intelligible: bias, modelling, survival analysis, variability, inference... None of this was foreign to him, and he knew how to make everything understandable without ever oversimplifying. His pedagogy, tinged with subtle humour, was both generous and stimulating.

In one of his major studies, published in Nature, he observed — with the precision of a statistician — that seasonal mortality peaked in summer. Irony of fate: it was on a December day that fate took him away.

His death leaves an immense void. The Faculty of Medicine will remember him as a meticulous researcher, a remarkable teacher, a methodical and creative mind, but also as a profoundly humane, loyal, and attentive colleague.