Sudan, venturing through the Sahara Desert, and back to the UK through Egypt and the east coast of Mediterranean Sea (via Jordan, Syria and Turkey). He often alluded to this trip nostalgically, as 6 months of bliss in "the most human place," and always encouraged others to travel and visit the world and its people. Career and research In 1964, Austen Angell joined the Argonne National Laboratory and worked with Dieter Gruen on transition metal spectroscopy and ionic solvent effects on cation coordination. Two years later, he was appointed as a faculty member of the Chemistry Department at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, US. With his students and postdocs, he studied glass forming aqueous solutions and discovered the paradoxical behavior of water in its supercooled liquid state. His postdoc Robin Speedy and he showed that water's compressibility and heat capacity, among other properties, exhibited anomalous behaviors, unlike all other molecular liquids, as it is supercooled. The implications of the predicted singularity at -45 °C (known as Speedy–Angell conjecture) have sparked tremendous scientific interest in the exotic aspects of the most common substance on Earth – water, which is still a matter of debate 50 years later. After about 20 years at Purdue, Angell moved to Arizona State University in 1989, while his concept of fragility had been popularizing in the scientific field, becoming widely recognized as a fundamental paradigm of glass and liquid sciences. In 1995, Angell contributed a lead article on amorphous materials to Science Magazine, where he blended the subject of glass forming liquids with additional features of sudden changes to different amorphous forms in anomalous liquids (known as polyamorphism). This article, entitled "Formation of glasses from liquids and biopolymers" has become Angell's most cited work. In 1998, the Journal of Physical Chemistry B devoted a special issue "C. Austen Angell Festschrift" to recognize Angell's contributions to physical chemistry, featuring the "Angell-plot" on the cover page. Of the many subjects in which he was interested, water was one of his most favored. Together with his colleagues, he pushed water and its salt solutions to extreme conditions via supercooling and negative pressures, and simulated these scenarios using molecular dynamics models. He placed water to a broader spectrum of anomalous liquids such as silicon, germanium, tellurium, and silica, and proposed that they undergo a fragile to strong transition on cooling. He was among the first to realize that water-like anomalies