Birth date: Nov 25, 1973 Death date: Sep 9, 2021
It is with great sadness, we would like to announce that Sergei Skarupo passed away on September 9, 2021. He was 47 years old. Originally from Ukraine, he moved to the US at the age of 20. His talents ranged from developing nanote Read Obituary
I probably met Sergey in the early 2000s through common friends, but we had our first in-depth conversation only in 2013. I was writing a series of short stories, and he read them and was giving me feedback, insightful and deep. I had a feeling that I should have paused, slowed down and spent more time speaking with him. I lived in LA all that time, and he lived in San Francisco. Then the pandemic. Only now I heard about his death. He seemed like a very deep, talented, wonderful person. I will keep our letters. RIP, Sergey.
My husband was a coworker of Sergei's and for a short but memorable span of months we lived within walking distance of his Berkeley apartment. Sergei quickly became a good friend and a fixture in our social life. I was always a little bit in awe of him--he was so brilliant, a serious person, a complete person, but he was also fun to be around, especially when there was music involved. He was also one of the most gracious hosts I've ever met--if you visited his apartment, he couldn't relax until he'd served you tea and food. I remember eating ice cream in his living room just to satisfy this requirement, and that memory makes me smile.
As Sergei's cancer progressed, he told us that his experience of music changed dramatically. Music, which had always been a source of pleasure, became ineffably more beautiful, complex, and absorbing. I hope that wherever Sergei is now, he's close to that music.
Thank you, Sergei, for being a friend.
I met Sergei through a wonderful couple, mutual friends. He was singing and playing guitar in his apartment, and you know what an impression that could make. I found ways to return there, to ask him about his eclectic library, or Russian history, something about Kiev, literature or poetry, a political point, or a picture on his wall, which led to more questions, and memories, sometimes entire genres, and reasons to return. He had questions too eventually, pages marked off in a book, a problematic translation, a curious metaphor, the story of an Italian journey, or a joke. Darjeeling tea would be made (perfectly), or a Turkish coffee put on the stove, and invariably other delicacies served in a Japanese bowls. The sun poured in the apartment in the afternoon - the whole afternoon through sunset was his hour, hummingbirds came and went on the balcony - and it was another world up there, an older world, that he would show and open to his friends, slowly and with reserve, but in fact extremely generously, so that conversation became a kind of creative unfolding and projects arose and could move forward even across long silences and time zones. The count on Le Conte, I called him in my mind, and directly eventually, at which he laughed. I moved away from California and didn’t speak with him in his last months, out of my own shameful cowardice. He had so much courage to face all this. Did he know how beautiful he was? Was all that beauty some comfort? I’m so grateful to all of you who have been by his side.
Very sad to hear of the passing of my yet very young former colleague at Nanomix: Sergei Skarupo . At Nanomix, he single handlely built the data treatment, database and datamining program without which we would never have been able to be the world first to put a nanotube based electronic device on the market, in 2005! He was one of the member of the best engineering team I ever had the chance to manage.
We just lost a discret nanotube technology pioneer, a great mind and a very gentle and sympathetic friend!
Farewell Sergei!
