The Legacy of Dr. Gómez-Pompa
Dr. Arturo Gómez-Pompa, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside, has won respect from politicians, scientists, and Mesoamericans for championing the rights of the poor in discussions of ecology and rainforest management. His focus is the evaluation of protected areas and the conservation of biodiversity in the American tropics. Through research, speeches, and publications, he exhibits scientific excellence and succeeds at involving native people in studying and preserving their habitats. Recognized by agro-economists and ethnoecologists for tact and compassion, he thrives as an organizer, educator, and consensus builder on issues involving living things.
Dr. Gómez-Pompa was born in Mexico City and earned degrees from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. At age 24, he received an appointment from the Mexican government to direct a commission partnering with pharmaceutical companies to survey medicinal plants. The task set him on a life's work studying the Mexican rainforest.
In 1966, Dr. Gómez-Pompa completed a Ph.D. in botany from his alma mater. In the late 1960s, he studied forest ecology at a biological station in Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and compiled a database of native plants in Veracruz. The project began a collection of facts and images that aids researchers in plant identification and provides information from major museums to the developing nations where specimens originated.
In Mexico, Dr. Gómez-Pompa founded the National Institute of Biotic Resources (INIREB), the impetus to agroecology, a new field of research into low-tech agricultural methods in rain forests. His conclusions highlighted local initiatives as the best way to preserve nature.
An endowment was created at UCR to continue to fund students studying ethnobotany and bring ethnobotanists to UCR to share their wealth of knowledge, experience, and perspectives in our biennial Gómez-Pompa seminar.
Excerpts from encyclopedia.com (full link below). To learn more about Dr. Gómez-Pompa's contributions to the world, please visit https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/gomez-pompa-arturo-1934
The Legacy of Dr. Demetrios M. Yermanos
Dr. Demetrios M. Yermanos, professor of agronomy and agronomist, was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. His education in the plant sciences started when he pursued both a master's degree in Greece and the United States. Dr. Yermanos studied agronomy from the University of Thessaloniki in 1946 and plant breeding from Iowa State University in 1952. Dr. Yermanos finished his Ph.D. in genetics at the University of California, Davis.
Following World War II, Dr. Yermanos served as assistant to the director of American Agricultural Mission in northern Greece, with responsibility for visits with U.S. agricultural experts of local farms. He interrupted this activity to serve three years as an ordnance officer in the Greek army. After obtaining his MS degree in the US, he returned to Greece in 1953 to serve as World Council of Churches director in northern Greece. In this position, he assisted with the emigration to Canada and Australia of individuals from rural populations who had been displaced or injured during World War II or the Greek Civil War. He also represented the Church World Service as immigration assistant in New York from December 1955 to September 1956.
His lifelong interest in oilseed crops, no doubt, was deeply rooted in Greek tradition of the veneration of oil and the olive tree. As specialist in the Department of Agronomy and Range Science at UC Davis, he initiated research with safflower, sunflower and flax. His doctoral thesis evaluated the level of epistatic gene action in oilseed flax. When the Department of Agronomy was established on the Riverside campus in 1961, Dr. Yermanos was appointed as one of the original faculty members in the department. Here, he continued his oilseed research, investigating flowering and capsule development.
Dr. Demetrios M. Yermanos' legacy is kept alive through an endowment created to celebrate him. This endowment is responsible for bringing enrichment to the Botany and Plant Science department through guest speakers at our biennial Yermanos seminar talk and through the funding of students.