Prof. Rey Donne S. Papa, PhD, Dean of the College of Science and one of the country’s foremost limnologists, is the first Filipino to become national representative in the International Society of Limnology. In recent years, Papa has risen to prominence in the field due to his and his colleagues’ work in freshwater systems like Lake Taal.
In 2016, Papa organized the first-ever Philippine Symposium on Freshwater Biodiversity Ecosystems, which gathered scholars from here and abroad for a four-day activity in UST, which also received funding from the United States Agency for International Development and the United States National Academy of Science. In the same year, Papa was elected as the Vice-President of the Association of Systematic Biologists of the Philippines, of which he is now President. He also serves as the Vice-President of the Philippine Society for Freshwater Science.
Papa is an expert in tropical freshwater microcrustacean zooplankton ecology and systematics, as well as lake ecology. The research undertakings he and Thomasians have been engaged in with regard to Lake Taal have led to, among other scientific endeavors, the creation of the UST Zooplankton Reference Collection, the first organized repository of freshwater zooplankton in the Philippines.
Papa became Dean of the College of Science in January 2020. He teaches at the UST Graduate School and the Department of Biological Sciences, and is also a researcher of the Research Center for Natural and Applied Sciences.
