Vale Michael Humphreys

News of Michael’s passing last weekend deeply saddened me and I’ve been unable to think of anything else since. He was the definitive scholar and gentleman, and he had a hugely positive impact on my career over four and a half decades now.  In 1981 when I was casting about for a PhD research question, my supervisor at the University of Queensland, Andris Auliciems, gave me a re-print of a Technical Note from the UK Building Research Establishment that had been authored by Michael Humphreys in the mid-1970s (Field Studies of Thermal Comfort Compared and Applied). It was an inspirational overview of the adaptive thermal comfort model, and it helped me to crystallise the central concept of my PhD.

What started as a PhD topic morphed into the core question of my entire research career, but I had to wait until the 1990s to actually have the pleasure of meeting Michael face-to-face at the seminal Windsor Conferences. It was such a pleasant surprise to discover that someone who had influenced my scientific curiosity so fundamentally was so accessible, affable, and genuinely interested in an early career researcher like me coming from nowhere important. Michael stayed in pretty close contact with me ever since those early encounters, always making time for me whenever I had a thorny question about human adaptability to indoor climates.

I will always treasure those wonderful memories of my quality time with Michael in Windsor, and especially the time he stayed in my home for a couple of days when I hosted his visit to The University of Sydney in 2009.  He was a towering intellect with a wicked sense of humour, a scintillating conversationalist with an ever so quaint turn of phrase e.g. “Dear Richard, I’m terribly afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree on this last argument of yours, but I don’t intend to queer your pitch!”