Henzel Geghamian

Henzel Geghamian was born  on May 28, 1938, in the village of Azatavan, in Armenia’s  Artashat region, home to the largest community of Armenians from  Salmast. From 1944 to 1954, he studied in Yerevan’s number 29 boys’  school; from 1957 to1962 he attended the Faculty of Agronomy of the  Armenian Agricultural Institute. Between 1966 and 1969 he pursued higher  education and defended his  thesis on  the "Behavior of Radioisotopes  in the Environment" at the Obninsk Institute of Medical Radiology, led  by the famous biologist, Professor Nikolai Timofeyev-Resovsky.  From  1970 to 1975 he worked at the Hydroponics Research Institute, at the  Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR,  concentrating on solutions to  Agrochemical Problems. In 1975 Geghamian moved to France with his family  and worked in the Forest Ecology Laboratory of  Paris Diderot  University (also known as Paris 7), in Fontainebleau.  In 1983, he  started working for a Franco-German chemical-pharmaceutical company,  conducted experiments in the territory of the former Soviet Union and  introduced dugs his company had developed for the protection of plants  and animals. In parallel with his scientific activities, he corresponded  for many years with the Paris-based "Yaraj" daily and published  numerous scientific articles.  In 1980, Geghamian published an extensive  article about V. I. Vernadsky's teachings entitled "Biosphere and  Living Matter" in the academic journal of the USSR Academy of Sciences,  "General Biology", and went on to suggest that Vernadsky’s methodology,  which had become a branch of science, be called "Biospherology". The  term was adopted by the scientific community and today it is used more  and more widely. In 1988, he played a significant role in the creation  and development of the Vernadsky International Fund [2]. In 1995, he was  given the title of “Foreign Member of the Russian Ecological Academy”,  and received the Vernadsky Silver Medal as well as the Diploma of the  Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in 2004. In 2018, he was installed  as a “Full Member of the Ukrainian Academy of Technology”. Throughout  his career, Geghamian has remained internationally active in scientific  circles, and has given numerous lectures in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev,  Paris, Prague, and Berlin.