Luis Alberto Vicente Tojo passed away on Feb. 6, 2018 at the age of 38 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, following a long battle with brain cancer.

From 2009 to 2016, Luis was a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He had earned a B.A. in English Philology from the Universidad de Deusto, Spain; a PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University, the Netherlands; and after a short lecture engagement at the University of Amsterdam, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, supported by a prestigious scholarship from the Basque Government. He successfully obtained his Habilitation in July 2016 at Potsdam. Since 2002, he had published numerous papers, and was working on several others, as noted on his CV (http://www.luisvicente.net/).

His colleagues in Leiden wrote: "Luis was a prolific researcher who has published a large number of important works on various phenomena. He was primarily as specialist of Spanish, English and Basque, but he also worked on Hungarian, Portuguese and Mandarin. He produced influential papers on the nature of movement dependencies, with special attention to the fronting of predicates and information-structure driven movement. He was one of the most prominent scholars of anaphora and ellipsis, and contributed to many empirical and theoretical aspects of a multitude of phenomena in these domains: sluicing, gapping, right node raising, fragmentary replies, their syntactic representation as well as their semantics. His most cited publication (co-authored by Cilene Rodrigues and Andrew Nevins) has shown that elided material in sluicing can contain non-isomorphic structures with respect to the antecedent.

"His friends and colleagues have known him as an extremely knowledgeable, dedicated and genuine linguist. He had a critical mind, was generous with his ideas and had high standards for scientific quality. His serious intellect was matched by his unassuming manners, a very kind personality and a great sense of humour."

Luis was diagnosed with an astrocytoma brain tumor in December 2012. It was removed and he quickly recovered, resuming his work at the University of Potsdam shortly thereafter. His colleagues noted that he was always a scientist with an analytical mind. When he was a keynote speaker at a conference following the removal of the first tumor, he began his presentation by showing the scans of his brain before and after the operation.

Luis enjoyed reading, comedy, cooking and - especially - good coffee and chocolate. He was an avid runner and often ran with his wife, Amanda Shuman, whom he met while at UC Santa Cruz. He was also proud that, together, they could capably manage in 7 languages. Their daughter, Emma Maria, was born in March 2014 in Berlin; Luis liked to take her for runs in the jogging stroller, and to sing and read to her in Spanish.

Six weeks after passing his Habilitation in 2016, Luis felt ill, and a trip to the ER led to a scan showing a new tumor, this time an inoperable Glioblastoma. For the next year and half, he underwent radiation and endured non-stop chemotherapy rounds. Unfortunately, in November 2017, a third tumor was found - also inoperable but so aggressive it was not visible at all in the August scans.

Luis is survived by his wife and daughter, both of Freiburg; his parents, Miguel Vicente Vicente and Candi Tojo Bermejo, and sister, Feli Vicente Tojo, of Astrabudua, Vizcaya, Spain; his aunts Pepa and Brigi Vicente Vicente, cousin Luis Vicente Vicente and partner Marian Lobato, cousin Jose Antonio Vicente Vicente and his wife Jaione Ayo and their two children, Ibai and Leire, all also of Astrabudua; his cousins Juan Garcia, Teresa Garcia, Teresa Tojo and Pepe Tojo, all of Arzua, Galicia, Spain; and his in-laws, Gene and Sue Shuman, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, David and Karla Shuman, and his nephew, Paul, all of Fairfax, Virginia, USA.

In lieu of sending flowers, the family suggests a donation be made to a brain cancer research organization in Luis' name.