Deep mourning with the loss of Ekaterina Alekseevna (Katya) Sidorchuk (09.07.1981–20.01.2019), an excellent and promising palaeontologist

Abstract

Ekaterina Alekseevna Sidorchuk (Katya to all that knew her) (Fig.1) was born in Moscow into a family of scientists: her father was a geomorphologist and her mother a Quaternary palynologist. Soil/peat microsamples from the North Russian Quaternary, the main research material of her mother, are commonly rich in oribatid mites, which Katya started to study when she entered the Geographical Faculty of Moscow State University after completing her high school education in 1998. In the Department of Biogeography, her study of Quaternary oribatids was guided by the known Russian acarologist, the late Prof. Dmitry Krivolutsky. Katya graduated from the University in 2004 and post-graduated in 2007 when she obtained her PhD degree for the study titled “Oribatid mites as bio-indicators of environmental change during the Holocene (modern and fossil bog communities of Northern European Plain)”. The next year, 2008, she entered the A.A. Borissiak Paleontological Institute and worked at the Arthropoda Laboratory until her recent untimely departure.