Gregório Bondar

Gregório Gregorievitch Bondar (1881 to 1959) was a Ukrainian-Brazilian agronomist and entomologist who contributed greatly to Brazilian entomology. Born to a farming family in the village of Malaia Buromca near Zolotonosha, he grew up partly in Siberia, was arrested for political activity around the 1905 revolution and left Russia, graduating as an agronomist from the University of Nancy in 1910. In Brazil from 1911 he worked at the Campinas Agronomical Institute, received Brazilian citizenship in 1913 and became professor of agricultural zoology and entomology at the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture. After returning to Russia for the war and escaping a death sentence, he settled in Bahia in 1921 as entomologist and plant pathologist for the state Department of Agriculture and later worked at the Cacau Institute of Bahia. He described 318 insect species, many of them pests of the plants he studied, and several new palms, and a research station at Belmonte, Bahia, is named for him.