Professor Eric W. Banister, 1933–2010: Obituary
Eric died in Vancouver in June 2010 after a struggle against declining health. He had emigrated to Canada after completing his doctoral degree in Physiology at Manchester University in the United Kingdom, and he had a long and distinguished academic career as professor and head of the School of Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University (SFU).
Eric is known to our readers as the former editor in chief of Sports Medicine, Training and Rehabilitation. He was a tireless worker for the journal, setting it on its rising path through a change of publisher and forming a wider editorial group, before handing over to Youlian Hong and the name change to Research in Sports Medicine. Eric's all-round contribution is immeasurable.
Eric is also well known to kinesiology graduates of SFU, where his charming personality and British sense of humour were universally appreciated. Sabbatical visitors and post-docs at SFU, including ourselves, will also remember him. He willingly gave his time to and shared his knowledge with everyone. The wider SFU community has lost one of its most faithful friends and hard-working servants.
Eric's expertise lay in exercise and environmental physiology. Perhaps his most significant publication is the seminal paper: Calvert, Banister, Savage, & Bach. A systems model of the effects of training on physical performance (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 6(2), 94–102, 1976). He was well ahead of his time in advising that to optimise performance, a sizeable tapering period should be undertaken immediately prior to competition, something that is now taken for granted! This work led us to collaborate with him regarding the more sophisticated modeling of optimal human performance (Journal of Applied Physiology, 69(3), 1171–1177, 1990; and 71(3), 1151–1158, 1991), and the kinetic response of blood lactate (Journal of Sports Sciences, 17, 239–248, 1999). Academic research too has lost one of its greats.
R. Hugh Morton and Yoshiyuki Fukuba