Alexander “Alex” D. Pavlista, professor emeritus in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, passed away peacefully in a hospital in Denver, Colorado, on the evening of Sept. 12 following a sudden heart attack. He was 79.
Born in Praha, Czechoslovakia, in March 1947, Pavlista immigrated to the United States with his family in 1948 when the communist regime took power. After a three-year journey through Austria, West Germany and France, the family arrived in New York Harbor aboard the ship Liberté in 1951, where he first saw the Statue of Liberty.
Growing up in New York City, Pavlista attended parochial schools. After reading a biography of Louis Pasteur and the novel Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis as a 13-year-old, he decided he wanted to do research in biology. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Manhattan College in 1968, then spent two years doing biomedical research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He returned to New York City and earned a PhD in biology — with a specialty in plant physiology — from the City University of New York in 1977, studying enzyme activity during lettuce seed germination.
Pavlista then worked as a USDA research associate in weed science at North Carolina State University, studying witchweed. Two years later, he joined American Cyanamid Co. in Princeton, New Jersey, where he spent nine years researching plant growth regulators. There he began studying potatoes in 1980, attended his first Potato Association of America meeting in Monterey, California, in 1982, and received a patent for his work on nitroguanidine and cyanoguanidine chemistry.
In 1988, Pavlista joined the university's Panhandle Research Extension and Education Center in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, as potato specialist and crop physiologist. He spent 29 of his 50 years of research there before retiring in 2017.
At the center, he built ties to the potato industry at the local, state and national levels by making research-based information easy for growers to access. He created the Potato Education Guide, one of Nebraska Extension’s earliest and most extensive online collections for farmers. He published 20 volumes of the newsletter Nebraska Potato Eyes and 22 Extension publications, including the 2016 NebGuide “Growth of the Nebraska Potato Industry,” which traces nearly 150 years of the state’s industry. He also conducted cultivar evaluations for more than 20 years, many of them published in USDA’s National Potato Germplasm Evaluation and Enhancement Reports and issued pest control reports and alerts for growers.
His potato research centered on plant growth regulators and hormones, environmental response, vine desiccation, irrigation and pest control, and extended to crops including canola, camelina, winter wheat and dry edible beans. His work on pest control, irrigation scheduling, sulfur fertilization and new varieties helped raise Nebraska potato yields. He released the Red Cloud potato cultivar, published five book chapters on potatoes, and wrote 42 journal articles on potatoes and 25 on other crops.
He served as president of the Potato Association of America in 2008 and was named an honorary life member in 2015.
Pavlista is survived by his wife, Victoria. A funeral service and cremation were held Monday, Sept. 28.
