Dolores Ramirez

Dolores A. Ramirez is a Filipino geneticist. She specializes in plant breeding and plant cytogenetics. She was named a National Scientist of the Philippines in 1998.

Ramirez served as an associate editor of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science and the Philippine Phytopathological Journal. She was the editor-in-chief of The Philippine Agriculturist for 10 years. She served on the Board of Trustees of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and held the Professorial Chair for Genetics of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) from 1974 to 1976.

After Ramirez completed her PhD, she returned to the University of the Philippines where she conducted research into the breeding and cytogenetics of plants. She was hired by the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines Los Baños as an assistant professor in 1964. She attained the position of associate professor in 1969 and full professor in 1974. She was named a full University Professor in 1995.

She attended the University of the Philippines Los Baños, earning a bachelor of science in agriculture, magna cum laude, in 1956. Her thesis, under Dioscoro L. Umali, concerned the nature of lodging in rice. She received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and attended the University of Minnesota in the United States. She studied under cytogeneticist Charles Burnham and earned her MSc in cytogenetics in 1958. She continued on to Purdue University, studying under geneticist Mark L. Tomes. She received her PhD in biochemical genetics in 1963, minoring in plant pathology and plant physiology.

Dolores A. Ramirez was born on September 20, 1931, in Calamba, Laguna to Leonor Altoveros and Augusto U. Ramirez. She was the oldest of eight children and her father died when she was young. She graduated from Laguna Institute in 1952 with a First Honorable Mention award.