Dear Colleagues, It was with great sadness that I have been informed Jacob Mincer (Professor Emeritus of Economics at Columbia University, New York) has passed away on August 20 at the age of 84. Jacob Mincer was one of the founding fathers of modern empirical labor economics. Jacob Mincer was born in Tomaszow (Poland) on 15 July 1922 to Dvora and Yitzchak Mincer, and like many of his generation, his life was tragically disrupted due to the terrible consequences of World War II. During WWII he was arrested several times and spent most of the time in detention camps. After the war, and realizing that he had lost all his close family members, he was determined to leave Europe and in 1948 he was offered a Scholarship from the Hillel Foundation and moved the United States to continue his studies. He did his undergraduate studies in Economics at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia), graduating in 1950. He initially started his graduate studies in Economics at the University of Chicago, but then moved to Columbia, due to personal reasons. After finishing his PhD in 1957 at Columbia, Mincer moved back to Chicago to a post-doctoral fellowship, staying there during the 1957-8 academic year and interacting closely with people such as Gregg Lewis, Albert Rees and T. W. Schultz. These would stimulate him to pursue further his work on human capital and labour economics. Mincer then returned for another brief spell to the City College of New York, as assistant professor (1958-60), and finally in 1960 he joined the Faculty of Economics at Columbia as an associate professor. He would develop most of his career at Columbia, becoming a full professor in 1962 and Buttenwieser Professor of Economics in 1979; and he has been an emeritus professor since 1991. It was also at Columbia that Mincer developed a very fruitful professional interaction with Gary Becker who had moved to Columbia in the late fifties (1958). They created the Columbia Workshop on Labor Economics which would be extremely influential in the development of human capital research and contemporary labor economics. Mincer remained at Columbia until his retirement and continued to influence several generations of labor economists through his continued interest in human capital topics. This influence was enhanced by Mincer's ability to develop research work in a collaborative way with his former students or younger colleagues. Mincer's pioneering work on human capital theory, labour supply, and many other important topics will leave a lasting legacy in labour research. Despite his well-known discretion, Mincer was awarded several honors throughout his career that recognized the relevance of his work to economics and social sciences in general. These included a Distinguished Fellowship of the American Economic Association in 1989, an honorary degree from the University of Chicago in 1991, and the first IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2002. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (since 1967) and a member of the National Academy of Education (since 1974), which demonstrate not only his broad interests but also the relevance of his research to a large and multidisciplinary community of scholars. In 2000 he has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest academic honors in the US. In 2004, the Society of Labor Economists created a career achievement award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics and awarded it in its first year to Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker. The prize was later renamed the Mincer Award. Mincer is survived by his wife, Dr. Flora Mincer, his two daughters and two grandchildren.