It is with great sadness that I inform you that last Sunday Vera Trnkova has passed away at the age of 84 years. In the last couple of years she suffered from a disease that made her life very difficult, so that she could only leave her appartment in a wheelchair. This is a great loss to the category theory community: Vera was an incredibly enthusiastic and gifted researcher, and her seminars, in which she made it possible for students from their early years to participate at topical research, were a great inspiration to the participants. She published a monograph, coauthored by Ales Pultr, on embeddings of categories, which was one of her life-long topics. And another one, coauthored by me, on the categorical theory of automata. In a series of more than 160 research articles she combined category theory with general topology, theoretical computer science and combinatorics. Another life-long topic of Vera's was the theory of set functors which she and her pupils developed in a substantial series of papers. That theory found applications in diverse areas of mathematics. Vera was also a dear friend, whose personality influenced a number of her colleagues and students. She will be missed by many of us. Jiri Adamek [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]