Classes & Obits

Robert N. Mowbray ’57

Issue

January-February 2026

Robert N. Mowbray ’57 died on June 24, 2025. Bob graduated from Catonsville (Maryland) High School. He majored in English, ran cross-country, and was a member of the Dartmouth Outing Club. After Dartmouth he joined the U.S. Marine Corps (artillery officer), earned a master’s in forestry at Yale, and joined the Peace Corps for three years in Ecuador. He went to graduate school at Duke University to study forest ecology with an emphasis on the tropics. Two years of coursework at Duke were followed by two years in the Amazon basin studying shifting agriculture and a year analyzing soils at the University of Tennessee. After a year at Oak Ridge (Tennessee) National Laboratories and a few months restoring strip mines for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Bob returned to South America with the Peace Corps in Paraguay, reaching the Peace Corps five-year limit in 1977. He joined the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in San Jose, Costa Rica, to play a leadership role in the development of a natural resource conservation loan project. In July 1980 he was transferred to Jamaica, where he was responsible for loan projects in wastewater management and agricultural marketing. Additional USAID assignments continued for a full career in biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture. After retirement he continued to work as a consultant in his field and expanding into climate change. Bob was an Alumni Fund volunteer. He is survived by his wife, Sonia; and daughters Elizabeth and Norma.

 

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