July 28, 2010
Each year the ESA Governing Board selects up to 10 Fellows from the 6000-member society for the prestigious honor, which acknowledges outstanding contributions in one or more of the following: research, teaching, extension, or administration. They will be inducted as Fellows at the ESA’s annual meeting, to be held Dec. 12-15 in San Diego.
Bruce Hammock
Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty in 1980 and holds a joint appointment with the UC Davis Cancer Research Center. He received his bachelor of science degree from Louisiana State University and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in entomology. He trained with John Casida at Berkeley and Larry Gilbert at Northwestern and worked from 1978-80 at the UC Riverside Department of Entomology before accepting a position at UC Davis.
As an insect developmental biologist, Hammock manipulated the juvenile hormone by inhibiting its degradation, generating giant larval insects. He found that feeding could be terminated by inserting genes for insect enzymes into baculovirus vectors, resulting in tiny insects. His laboratory pioneered the use of transition state theory to inhibit enzymes with small molecules and recombinant viruses as green pesticides.
In environmental chemistry, he pioneered the use of immunochemistry for pesticide analysis. His laboratory currently uses nanobodies and phage display technologies to improve reagents for the design of biosensors.
From his time as a graduate student, Hammock and his laboratory have focused on xenobiotic metabolism and largely on esterases and epoxide hydrolases. Current projects involve examining the role of esterases in insecticide resistance and human metabolism of pyrethroids. His laboratory is exploiting inhibitors of epoxide hydrolases as drugs to treat diabetes, inflammation, ischemia, and cardiovascular disease. Compounds from the UC Davis laboratory are in human trials.
Hammock received the UC Davis Faculty Research Lecture Award in 2001 and the Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching in 2008. Hammock directs the UC Davis Superfund Research Program, which earlier this year received a $13.2 million, five-year competitive renewal grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). He also directs the National Institutes of Health Biotechnology Training Program and the NIEHS Combined Analytical Laboratory.
Hammock's peer-reviewed publications total 763.
Thomas Scott joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology Department in 1996 and is the director of the UC Davis Mosquito Research Laboratory. He earned his doctorate in ecology from Pennsylvania State University and was a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine. He held his first faculty position in the Department of Entomology, University of Maryland. He co-founded the Center for Vector-Borne Research and served as director of the Davis Arbovirus Research Unit, and as vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology. A member of ESA since 1983, he is a former chair of Section D. He has published more than 175 research articles, reviews, and book chapters.
A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scott was a National Research Council Associate and is a past president of the Society for Vector Ecology. He chairs the Mosquito Modeling Group in the program on Research and Policy in Infectious Disease Dynamics, and is a subject editor for the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Scott’s research focuses on mosquito ecology, evolution of mosquito-virus interactions, epidemiology of mosquito-borne disease, and evaluation of novel products and strategies for mosquito control and disease prevention.
Scott aims to generate the detailed, difficult-to-obtain data necessary for assessing current recommendations for disease prevention, rigorously testing fundamental assumptions in public health policy, and developing innovative, cost- and operationally-effective strategic concepts for prevention of some of the most important infectious diseases of humans.
UC Davis Department of Entomology: 13 Fellows Since 1947
With the election of Hammock and Scott, ESA has now selected 13 members of the UC Davis Department of Entomology as Fellows. The first was Richard M. Bohart (1917-2007), for whom the Bohart Museum of Entomology is named. He received the honor in 1947.
Twelve others followed: Donald McLean, elected in 1990; Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. (1907-2003), 1991; John Edman, 1994; Robert Washino, 1996; Bruce Eldridge, 2001; William Reisen, 2003; Harry Kaya, 2007; Michael Parrella and Frank Zalom, 2008; Walter Leal, 2009; and Bruce Hammock and Thomas Scott, 2010.
One other University of California entomologist is on the 2010 Fellows list: Thomas Miller of UC Riverside. The entire list of the Fellows and their accomplishments is on the ESA website.
Related links:
More about Thomas Scott and his dengue research
More about Bruce Hammock and his bench-to-bedside research
More about Thomas Miller of UC Riverside
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894