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Guido Pozza, MD and Emeritus Professor of Medicine, passed away on the 21st of November 2018. He was among the founders of Acta Diabetologica Latina when, in 1964, Dr. Agostino Carandente, CEO of Hoechst Italy, offered an unrestricted sponsorship to the Publisher “Il Ponte” to create a new scientific Journal aimed at diffusing and developing clinical and experimental research in diabetes.

In the following years, Guido Pozza and Sergio Marigo (La Spezia) were Managing Editors of the Journal, the Advisory Board being formed by Ugo Butturini (Parma), Ernst Rudolf Froesh (Zurich), Harry Keen (London), Pierre Lefebvre (Liege), Gianfranco Lenti (Turin), Rolf Luft (Stockholm), Hellmut Mehnert (Munchen), Philippe Vague (Marseille), Bernardo L. Wajchenberg (Sao Paulo), and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (New York). At the beginning, the journal was bilingual: Italian and English, becoming later only English, showing a clear vocation to an international setting. In 1991, the name was changed to Acta Diabetologica, with the target of being even more international. As a result, Acta Diabetologica is now the longest serving scientific journal on diabetes in Europe.

The contribution of Guido Pozza to the development of Acta Diabetogica was tireless, contributing to the Journal to being indexed and achieving and improving its Impact Factor over the years. Managing the Journal moved from the pioneering times of hand-typing and re-typing every single piece of paper in the peer-review process to the sophisticated and effective online management of recent times. There was a further development when Springer, later Springer-Nature, became Publisher and Sanofi offered an unrestricted sponsorship. Being part of a big publishing group provided the journal with a further boost in terms of international reach.

Guido Pozza shared his position of Editor-in-Chief of the Journal with Renato Lauro, and both left their position in June 2013 to Massimo Porta, the current EiC. Guido Pozza maintained the position of Funding Editor.

We will keep with us the memory of a great clinician and researcher, endowed with a deep sense of fairness and human kindness, a gentleman who invested so much energy into developing a professional environment that generated many lines of development in basic investigation and bedside medicine, above and beyond diabetes and Acta Diabetologica. His curiosity, diligence, accuracy, and honesty are a legacy that we receive and hope to deserve, pursue and honor.