Vicente Lava

Vicente Gregorio Lava (December 24, 1894 – September 16, 1947) was a Filipino chemist who supported efforts towards economic independence for the Philippines and later became a leader in the communist resistance against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

Vicente Gregorio Lava was born on December 24, 1894, in Bulakan, Philippines, at the end of the Spanish colonial period. He was the eldest child of Adeodato and Maria (Baltazar) Lava. Four years after he was born, the Spanish were driven out of the Philippines, followed by the American suppression of an independence movement in 1901 and the beginning of American neocolonialism in the islands.

From 1912 to 1916, Lava studied chemistry at the University of the Philippines.

Lava moved to the United States to pursue higher education in 1917, enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley. After a brief stint in 1918 in the US Army, where he served in the chemical warfare division, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he earned his MS in 1920 and Ph.D. in 1923 in chemistry. While in New York he met his wife, Ruth Propper.

He returned to the Philippines with Ruth in 1923, where he worked for two years as a chemist in the Bureau of Science. In 1925, Lava became a professor at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, where, in his interest in promoting local Philippine industry, which he believed was neglected as a result of the American Payne-Aldritch Tariff Act, he began research on a process of extracting oil and other fuels from coconuts. During this time he and Ruth had two children: Frances (1924–2011) and Vicente “Buddy” Jr. (1926–2006).

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