November 24, 2015, 9:20p.m. – ELEVEN Thomasian researchers made it to the list of the top 250
scientists in the Philippines, according to an online ranking released
this month.
Fortunato Sevilla III ranked 40th
in the online index and led the roster of Thomasian researchers in the
database of Webometrics, an outfit that compiles rankings of higher
education institutions.
The University
conferred on Sevilla the title professor emeritus last September, the
highest honor bestowed by UST to a faculty member, for his scientific
contributions and 46 years of service to the Thomasian community.
Joining
Sevilla in the ranking are College of Science professors Alicia
Aguinaldo (70th place), who is known for her work on the chemistry of
natural products; John Donnie Ramos (75th place), who has a doctorate
degree from Singapore in biology and immunology; Bernhard Egwolf (85th
place), a doctor of natural sciences in physics; and Allan Patrick
Macabeo (139th place), a 2013 Merck Young Scientist awardee in health
sciences.
Also, Grecebio Jonathan Alejandro who
has doctorate in natural sciences (182nd place); Thomas Edison de la
Cruz (185th place) who also has a doctorate in natural sciences; Mario
Tan (201st place) who has a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences;
faculty member Rey Donne Papa (205th place); Mary Beth Maningas (221st
place), a researcher at the Research Center for Natural and Applied
Sciences; and Bernard John Tongol (241st).
Sevilla,
Alejandro, Macabeo and Maningas received various distinctions last July
in the annual meeting of the government’s top scientific advisory body,
for their contributions to their respective fields.
The list, composed of 250 profiles, included former PhD students and those who had been affiliated with UST.
Janus Ong of the University of the Philippines topped the list of Philippine scientists with 4,948 citations to his credit.
The
database is a beta ranking of scientists according to their voluntarily
declared presence in Google Scholars Citations, a tool for setting up
author profiles of individuals and their publications as covered by the
Google Scholar search engine for scholarly literature.
According
to the Webometrics website, its ranking is “an independent, objective,
free, open scientific exercise,” done by the Cybermetrics Lab of the
Spanish National Research Council, to provide “reliable,
multidimensional, updated and useful information about the performance
of universities from all over the world based on their web presence and
impact.”
Rankings were also released for Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
The
database is funded by Acumen, a non-profit global venture that aims to
support organizations that help alleviate poverty. Dayanara T. Cudal and
Jerome P. Villanueva
