El-kereamy named Lindcove REC director

We are pleased to announce that Ashraf El-kereamy is our new director of Lindcove Research & Extension Center. Ashraf will start his new duties on July 1, 2020, and continue to serve as a Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UC Riverside.  

Elizabeth Grafton-Cardwell retires this year after 13 years as director of Lindcove REC, California's premier citrus research center. We are excited to have Ashraf in place to carry on the tremendous success attributable to the research performed at Lindcove. Ashraf brings a breadth of research, extension and leadership skills.

He has extensive experience with several commodities in research revolving around plant hormones, fruit ripening, plant nutrition, and the responses of different plant species to abiotic stress conditions. 

Since February 2019, El-kereamy has served as a UCCE specialist based at Lindcove Research and Extension Center. His primary responsibility is citrus horticulture and developing a comprehensive citrus research and extension educational program. Prior to the specialist position, El-kereamy was a UCCE viticulture and small fruit advisor for Kern County, where he established a research and extension program serving the San Joaquin Valley table grape industry for four years. Prior to joining UC ANR, he was an assistant/associate professor in the Department of Horticulture at Ain Shams University in Egypt. 

El-kereamy earned a B.Sc. in horticulture and M.Sc. in pomology from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, and a Ph.D. in agriculture with an emphasis in grapevine physiology and molecular biology from Toulouse University in France.

Ashraf said, “I am honored and very excited to be the director of Lindcove Research and Extension Center, which plays a crucial role in the California citrus industry. I am confident that, with the support of our industry, community and the University of California, we will build tomorrow's LREC as a center of excellence in research and extension. I am looking forward to leading LREC and providing our clientele with up-to-date technologies to cope with the challenges facing the California agriculture industry nowadays.”

Please join me in wishing Ashraf the best in his new position as the director of Lindcove REC.

L. Mark Lagrimini
Vice Provost for Research and Extension

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