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IDRC mourns the loss of María de Jesús Gines known as Chusa

2002-01-30

It is with great sadness that we have learned that our colleague, Chusa Gines, was on the TAME airliner which crashed Monday morning, January 28, 2002, at the border between Ecuador and Colombia. Rescue workers succeeded in reaching the site only on January 29 and confirmed that there were no survivors.

Chusa became an IDRC program officer in October 1992 with the Environment and Natural Resources Division at IDRC. Earlier, she had done contract work for the Centre, contributing among other things to the publication 101 Technologies From the South for the South. Two years later, she was promoted to the position of Senior Program Officer. In November 1995, returning from maternity leave, she was appointed Chief Scientist for Biodiversity. Then in April 1997 she became Team Leader of the Sustainable Use of Biodiversity (SUB) program initiative.

Since December 2000, she was on secondment to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia, as coordinator of the ‘Strategies for Integrating Small-Scale End-Users in Cassava Biotechnology Research’ project, funded by IDRC and the Dutch Government. She was based in Quito and was going to visit CIAT in Cali when the accident occurred.

Chusa had a Ph. D with specialization in Molecular Genetics & Biotechnology from Carleton University. She worked for Environment Canada and the National Research Council before joining the Centre.

She had been from the start one of the main driving forces behind all the Biodiversity activities of IDRC and participated actively in all of them. We will all miss her drive, her energy and her insight. Chusa did so much during her relatively short life, and no doubt would have achieved a lot more.

Our thoughts accompany her husband, Patrik Hunt, and her son, Darío. Patrick Hunt, her husband, is also well known in IDRC having done work on the impact of the internet in Latin America for the Program and Partnership Branch work for the Communications Division.

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