Trib­utes have been pour­ing in­to the chess and the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) com­mu­ni­ties fol­low­ing the sud­den death of Dr Jo-Anne Ni­na Sewlal, co-founder of the Point Fortin Chess Cen­tre (PFCC).

Dr Sewlal passed away peace­ful­ly at the ICU of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal on Sun­day. She was just 40 years old.

Dr Sewlal was born in Point Fortin, ed­u­cat­ed in south Trinidad even­tu­al­ly earn­ing her un­der­grad­u­ate and post­grad­u­ate de­grees at UWI, St Au­gus­tine. She quick­ly es­tab­lished her­self as a sci­en­tist of in­ter­na­tion­al re­pute and the Caribbean’s lead­ing ex­pert in the field of arach­nol­o­gy, serv­ing on many pro­fes­sion­al bod­ies world­wide.

She is the au­thor of 46 sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tions and 676 gen­er­al pub­li­ca­tions on ecol­o­gy, en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues and bio­di­ver­si­ty and the re­cip­i­ent of nu­mer­ous in­ter­na­tion­al fel­low­ships.

More re­cent­ly to­geth­er with busi­ness col­league Ray­mond Aaron she found­ed the PFCC with the ex­press mis­sion of in­tro­duc­ing chess to schools and the wider com­mu­ni­ty. This or­gan­i­sa­tion has grown to be­come one of the pre­mier chess groups in the coun­try and has trained some 174 stu­dents in its four years of ex­is­tence.

In pay­ing trib­ute co-founder Aaron said, "Jo-Anne’s con­tri­bu­tion to the com­mu­ni­ty, the world of sci­ence and the Chess fra­ter­ni­ty, in par­tic­u­lar, is im­mea­sur­able and my great­est fear is that she may be ir­re­place­able. May God con­tin­ue to bless her soul."