João Arménio Correia Martins was born on November 11, 1951, at the southern town of Olhão in Portugal. He attended high school at the Liceu Nacional de Faro which he completed in 1969. Afterwards João Martins moved to Lisbon where he was graduate student of Civil Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) until 1976. He was a research assistant and assistant instructor at IST until 1981. Subsequently, he entered the graduate school in the College of Engineering, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics of The University of Texas at Austin, USA. There he obtained a MSc in 1983 with a thesis titled A Numerical Analysis of a Class of Problems in Elastodynamics with Friction Effects and a PhD in 1986 with a thesis titled Dynamic Frictional Contact Problems Involving Metallic Bodies, both supervised by Prof. John Tinsley Oden. He returned to Portugal in 1986 and became assistant professor at IST. In 1989 he became associate professor and in 1996 he earned the academic degree of “agregado” from Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. Later, in 2005, he became full professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture of IST. His areas of research include contact solid mechanics, nonlinear dynamics and instability phenomena, mathematical methods and numerical techniques for the solution of solid mechanics problems, nonlinear constitutive laws in solid mechanics and biomechanics. His PhD thesis was on models and computational methods for the study of dynamic behaviour of metallic bodies subjected to dry frictional contacts. It contains (i) a detailed study of phenomenological interface constitutive laws (ii) a constitutive interface law incorporating the normal deformability of the interface and the Coulomb friction law, (iii) formulations of the dynamic and steady sliding contact problems together with proofs on existence and uniqueness of solutions, (iv) numerical techniques and algorithms for the study of the dynamic and steady sliding problems, (v) numerical finite element results and parametric studies on the stability of steady sliding and on friction induced oscillations. Prof. João Martins was member of the general assembly of IUTAM and served as vice-president of the Portuguese Association for Theoretical, Applied and Computational Mechanics (APMTAC) in 2006 and 2007. He also served as president of the ICIST research institute in 2003, 2004, 2007 and 2008. João Martins died unexpectedly in his home in Lisbon on 5 August 2008. His colleagues and former PhD students remember his ability in explaining ideas with simple models