It is with great sadness that I have to inform the society that our friend and colleague Prof Mark Warner FRS has very recently passed away. Mark was emeritus professor at the Cavendish laboratories of the University of Cambridge and one of the founders of the field of liquid crystalline elastomers. He was an eminent physicist, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Prof Warner has received a variety of prizes and awards, among them the Bragg Medal of the Institute of Physics, the GW Gray Medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society, the EuroPhysics Prize of the European Physical Society, the Maxwell Medal of the Institute of Physics and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize. With Mark Warner’s death we lost an outstanding colleague far too soon.