Dr. Donna Marykwas
Donna
Marykwas,
Ph.D. is
Founder and Executive Director,
Long Beach Grows.
Long Beach Grows is dedicated to promoting green,
healthy, sustainable
urban agriculture in Long Beach, California, and to promoting other
activities that educate, enhance, and grow our communities by ensuring
and safeguarding local food security.
Long Beach Grows aims to
educate the public about the benefits of urban agriculture (chickens,
goats, etc.), and to inform the public about gardening, farming, local
real
food, and other relevant learning resources available in Long Beach, and
to
provide access to trustworthy information about the nutritional benefits
of real food.
Part of the Long Beach Grows mission is to make it easier to do backyard
urban agriculture with fewer restrictions than the city currently
imposes, particularly on raising your own poultry & miniature varieties
of animals like dwarf goats. Please
sign their pro urban
agriculture petition.
The ultimate goal of Long Beach Grows is to grow a network of urban
farm co-operatives for food production in the heart of urban Long
Beach, with at least one community kitchen and urban farm site per
city district, where people can grow and harvest real food together
while building community and relieving hunger.
Donna earned her B.A. in Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania
in 1984. She earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell
Biology
at Cornell University in 1991. She was a PostDoctoral Fellow in Biology
at Harvard University from 1991 to 1996.
She has
designed and taught courses in microbiology, molecular biology, and
genetics for over 12 years as a university professor, first at the
University of Southern Mississippi and then at California State
University, Long Beach.
Donna’s scientific research has been published in peer-reviewed
scientific journals including J Bacteriology, J Molecular
Biology,
Microbiology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Proceedings
of
the
National Academy of Sciences and has been featured on the journal
covers of J Molecular Biology and Microbiology.
She has also coauthored and been awarded three patents from the
United States Patent and Trademark Office (U.S.P.T.O.) for methods in in vivo cloning and molecular evolution.
Read her
Long Beach Urban Agriculture Examiner column.
Visit her
Facebook page.
Read her
LinkedIn profile.
Read her
blog.