Dr. Dalia Nayak, an internationally reputed active and young radiochemist and associate editor of this journal, suddenly expired on 18 August, 11 pm (IST), in Kolkata, India. She was only 36 year of age and was a promising leader of the future generation of nuclear chemists. She did her M.Sc. from the University of Burdwan, India in 1996 and earned Ph.D from the same University in 1999. As Ph.D supervisor, I gave her the quite difficult task to separate no-carrier-added lanthanide radionuclides from charged particle activated target matrix. Her Ph.D thesis was first of its kind wherein systematically numbers of no-carrier-added lanthanide radionuclides were produced by heavy ion activation (7Li, 11B, 12C, 16O, etc.). After Ph.D she joined the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, India as a post doctoral fellow with me for a short period. In the year 2000, she was offered a post- doctoral fellowship at the Grand Accélérateur National d’Ions Lourds (GANIL), France. There she worked about ten months in the SPIRAL-II project. In 2001 she returned to SINP and again joined a postdoctoral position. From that time, she was an active member of the SINP radiochemistry group. In 2003, she was awarded with the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Award for young scientists. The INSA-young scientist award is the highest honour in India for scientists below 32 years. In fact, Dr. Nayak was the first radiochemist who grabbed this award. Apart from the production and separation of clinically important radionuclides by heavy ion activation, Dr. Nayak also took interest in the field of green chemistry, especially in the application of radiotracer techniques. Dr. Nayak joined SINP as a permanent faculty member in 2005. She was offered an associate membership of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) in 2007. In this capacity she visited twice the Institute of Modern Physics, Lanzhou, China, the last one just 40 days before her untimely departure. With reference to her academic activities, she has attended lots of international conferences worldwide and earned high degree of reputation. She also worked for couple of months with the GSI superheavy elements chemistry group. At the age of 36, she had about 60 publications in international journals of repute. The untimely death of Dr. Dalia Nayak is a shock and great loss to the radiochemistry group of SINP and well as to the national and international radiochemistry community. Her charming personality will be remembered forever.