Tamás Pócs (born 6 August 1933) is a Széchenyi Prize-winning Hungarian botanist, ecologist, and college professor and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include the taxonomy and distribution conditions of mosses, tropical ecology, and the flora of southwestern Transdanubia and the Southern Carpathians. He is associated with the collection of many plant specimens and the description of one hundred and forty new plant species. Between 1991 and 1995, he was the president of the Hungarian Biological Society. His great-grandfather Ferenc Kozma (1844–1920) was a teacher, publicist, and academic; his sister Éva Pócs (born 1936) is a folklore researcher.
Career Tamás Pócs was born in Budapest on 6 August 1933. He attended the Reformation Secondary School, where one of his teachers, the scientist Zoltán Nyárády, encouraged his early interest in botany. This interest developed further in his teens, when he started to collect phanerogamic and cryptogamic plants. Some of his early collections from Bükk, Mátra, Mecsek, South Zala, and Vendvidék are still kept at the Hungarian Natural History Museum. At the age of 15 he became a member of the Hungarian Botanical Society. It was here that he met distinguished botanists, such as Jávorka Sándor, Zólyomi Bálint, and Ujhelyi József, and discussed his botanical findings with them. Pócs attended a course given by lichenologist Ödön Szatala, which heightened his interest in this topic. He graduated in 1951 and then enrolled in the Department of Botany at the Faculty of Science of Eötvös Loránd University, where he obtained a degree in botany in 1956. He was invited by Soó Rezső to work at the Botanical Department after his graduation. He chose instead to accept employment at the herbarium of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, where he worked until 1962. During this time, in 1959, he defended his university doctoral dissertation and graduated summa cum laude. In 1962, he transferred to the teacher training college in Eger, where he began teaching at the Department of Botany, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor and college teacher. In 1978 he transferred to the Botanical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Vácrátót (starting in 1984, it was called the Ecological and Botanical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), where he worked as a scientific advisor and later was appointed head of the botany department. In 1983, he was inaugurated as an honorary professor at Eötvös Loránd University. There he taught tropical ecology for several years. He also taught the course Botany of Tropical Cultivated Plants at Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Science in Gödöllő. In 1991, he returned to Eger, the institution now named Károly Eszterházy College. He became the head of the botanical department and the deputy director general of the college, succeeding Hortobágyi Tibor, who originally founded the department. Pócs headed the department for 18 years. Pócs organized five major research expeditions in ten years as part of his research on the floristic and phytogeographical similarities of East Africa and the Indian Ocean archipelago. These expeditions occurred in Madagascar, the Seychelles, the Comoros, Réunion, Mauritius and the Rogriguez islands, and resulted in the collection of thousands of new specimens for the moss herbarium and the discovery of many new species. He retired in 1996 and then habilitated in the same year. Between 1997 and 2003, he continued to teach as a university professor. In 1999, he was assigned to lead the joint Bryology (Moss Research) Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the college. In 2003, he was awarded the title of professor emeritus. In addition, from 1969 to 1973 and from 1985 to 1989, he was an invited lecturer and visiting professor at the Tanzanian University of Agricultural Sciences in Morogoro. Since 2004, the Collegium Budapest has been conducting theoretical and astrobotanical research in Budapest. In 1967, Pócs defended his doctoral dissertation in biological sciences, and in 1977, his academic doctoral dissertation. His thesis was titled Komplex vegetációtanulmányok Kelet-Afrikában (Tanzánia, Uluguru hegység) ("Complex vegetation studies in East Africa (Tanzania, Uluguru Mountains)"). He became a member of the Botanical Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and later joined the Miskolc Regional Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2001 he was elected a full member. In addition, in 1991 the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters added him to its ranks. He was also a member of the editorial board of Acta Botanica Hungarica. He was chairman of the Hungarian Biological Society from 1991 to 1994 and the chairman of the Botany Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 1996. In the late 1970s Pócs and several colleagues developed the idea of establishing an unofficial group of eastern European bryologists to organize meetings and conferences to help organize bryological research in eastern Europe. This was not an easy task, especially for a transnational society, as the ruling Communist Party of each nation had to approve all official societies. Despite this, they were successful in establishing the Central and East European Bryological Working Group, based in Jena. In 1978 Pócs organized the first meeting in Eger, the start of a series of biennial conferences that continued until 1990. After the political changes in Eastern Europe, scientists were free to travel abroad, and these conferences were discontinued because they outlived their original purpose. Pócs was one of the founding members of the International Association of Bryologists, and the vice-president from 1981 to 1987.
Work
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