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.