2011 John Arthur Wilson Memorial Lecturer -- David Rabinovich, Leather Consultant, at the 105th ALCA Annual Meeting

The 52nd John Arthur Wilson Memorial Lecture will be presented at the Annual Meeting by David Rabinovich at 8:45 am on Friday, June 10, in Wacipi.  The title of his presentation will be "title."

David Rabinovich, born in the Andean town of Medellín, Colombia, received his primary and most of his secondary education at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana schools in Medellín. He attended the University of California at Berkeley where he received a BS in Chemistry (1962) and San José State College where he obtained a Master’s in Chemistry in 1965.

He worked since 1966 as a tanner in a family business, Andina de Curtidos, in the village of Copacabana just north of Medellín. He was involved in the founding of ACOLCUR, the Colombian Leather Chemists Association and was on the board of the CIDI's leather research institute at the Bolivariana; directing a Master's degree thesis on the use of chrome shavings as an ion-exchange resin to recover gold-cyanide tailings and radioactive metals. He was in charge of research and development for the Titán tannery in Cali, Colombia, from 1993 through 1995. In early 1996 he started working for J.H. Lowenstein & Sons, Brooklyn, NY, travelling mainly to India and Mexico, through 2006. Since 2007 he has been a leather consultant, currently travelling primarily to Latin America for Grupo ABC Leder Andino SA, implementing low pollution processing, with zero sulphide/chrome in the effluents from tannery wet-end processes.

In 1982 he presented a paper at the Latin-American Leather Chemists Congress, Bogotá, on the Colombian Cattle Slaughter Cycle. In November of 1982 he published a study of weight/area yield for lime-split upper leather in Das Leder. In November 1995, at the XIII Latin-American Leather Chemists Congress at Cartagena, he presented a paper on Environmental Thermodynamics Implications for the Leather Industry. In 1999, during the IULTCS congress at Chennai, he presented a paper on low float, low effluent retannages. In 1999 he awarded by the Mexican Leather Chemists Association the San Jordi prize for academic excellence for a paper titled: “Seeking Soft Leather with Good Break”, which lead to a publication in World Leather Magazine in 2002. He was appointed coeditor of a CLRI project for a Treatise on Leather Technology and assigned a chapter on the Material Science of Leather Making. His work on collagen reactivity, presented at the 105th ALCA Annual Meeting, is part of the CLRI treatise assignment.  He is a translator for JALCA Abstracts into Spanish and has been a member of the ALCA since 1966.