Interests
Jirair Hovnanian participated in a number of personal interest and philanthropic causes throughout his life.
Hovnanian was an avid sport fisherman. In August 1992 he and four others survived the sinking of his 127-foot-long (39 m) mega yacht, Lady Anna 90 miles (140 km) east-southeast off of Cape May, New Jersey.
Hovnanian and two scientists teamed up to found Nature's Wonder, a Philadelphia metropolitan area company that extracts a product from peat that encourages plant growth. Hovnanian was, himself, a champion grower of roses.
Hovnanian founded the Center for the Advancement of Natural Discoveries using Light Emission (CANDLE) in Armenia, his family's homeland before his parents fled to Iraq. The center, which is located in Yerevan, Armenia, "generates beams of ultraviolet light for protein crystallography." It helps to employ Armenian scientists who would otherwise have to move abroad to find work.
He also supported the Burlington County Boy Scout Council. To help future students, Hovnanian founded the Jirair S. Hovnanian Scholarship Fund.
Hovnanian received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2006 from the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations Inc.
Read more about this topic: Jirair Hovnanian
Famous quotes containing the word interests:
“Unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected. It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“two strangers uniting in the interests of torment”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)