- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Sparks, a retired research fellow at Corteva Agriscience (a Dow AgroSciences) in Indianapolis, Ind., will receive an inscribed plaque and a cash award at ESA's annual meeting in November, to be held in Denver, Colo., announced Michelle Smith, ESA president. The presentation will take place Nov. 2 during ESA's Awards Breakfast featuring the Founders' Memorial Lecture.
“This is a huge honor and directly due to Bruce's influence,” said Sparks.
This award recognizes creative entomologists who have demonstrated the ability to find alternative solutions to problems that significantly impact entomology. Sparks is the first scientist from the crop protection industry to receive this award.
“Tom was my first graduate student, receiving his doctorate at UC Riverside and later doing a sabbatical leave at UC Davis,” said Hammock, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology (now the Department of Entomology and Nematology) in 1980 from UC Riverside.
Sparks received his doctorate in entomology in December 1978. His emphasis: insect endocrinology/biochemistry and insecticide toxicology.
“His free-thinking, as well as his love for and intensity about science, characterized his career," Hammock said. "I remember an evening when he brought a 'Tandy' computer over and envisioned a concept of machine learning to optimize structures of drugs and agricultural chemicals that were too complex to evaluate with classical structure activity relationships."
“Fifty years later this is mainline biological chemistry,” Hammock pointed out, adding that Sparks started in biological control and then moved to insect physiology and toxicology (Hammock's lab) while in graduate school at UC Riverside. After graduate school, Sparks served as a professor of insecticide biochemistry and toxicology with the Louisiana State University's Department of Entomology. He then headed to Indianapolis to join Eli Lilly and Co., which shortly thereafter became DowElanco, then Dow AgroSciences, and finally Corteva Agriscience.
Sparks' lifelong focus is on developing green pesticides, Hammock said. “His greatest success of many successes has been with a complex group of what are known as polyketides. Specifically, Tom pioneered the spinosids as a new class of selective pesticides for integrated pest management (IPM). Tom was a leader in this program from the concept of natural product compounds through structural optimization to integration into pest management and resistance management programs nationally and internationally.”
Sparks' research interests include
- Agrochemical (especially. Insecticides) Discovery and Lead Generation
- Insecticide biochemistry and mode of action
- Insecticide resistance and resistance management
- Cheminformatics and quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR) and its application to lead generation and pesticide discovery.
- History and philosophy of agrochemical discovery
“Dr. Sparks is internationally recognized as a leader and innovator in the field of insect biochemistry and toxicology, especially as it relates to the discovery of new crop protection compounds,” wrote Ronda Hamm of Corteva Agriscience, Indianapolis, who headed the nomination team. “This latter point supported by his many awards relating to crop protection discovery but is highlighted in particular by two prior awards-- R&D Scientist of the Year in 2009, the first (and so far only) for any entomologist or for that matter, any scientist in the field of agriculture. More recently Dr. Sparks was the first industry scientist (and entomologist) to receive the American Chemical Society AGRO Division Innovation in Chemistry of Agriculture Award (2015).”
A member of ESA for more than 40 years, Sparks “has a history of bringing new ideas and innovative approaches to the discovery of new insect control agents, resulting in several commercial products,” Hamm pointed out. “Through his innovative application of state-of-the art technologies, Dr. Sparks has succeeded in catalyzing the discovery and development of natural product-based compounds for the control of pest insects. One particularly relevant measure of Dr. Sparks' innovation is patents--unusually for a non-chemist, he has 47 patents covering a wide range of chemistries and ideas as it applies to the control of agricultural pests.”
Hammock praised Sparks for his innovative accomplishments. “For the past several decades, Dr. Sparks' goal has been to provide new, greener, tools that will allow growers and farmers around the world to feed an expanding global population," Hammock said. "To this end, Dr. Sparks employed an array of innovative approaches to the discovery of new insect control agents. His innovations are well-illustrated by his ‘what if..' questions and his answers and results from those questions.”
“What if you could simplify large complex macrolide antibiotic-like compounds to make them synthetically accessible,” Hammock wrote in his letter of support. “This would be a radically different innovation paving a conceptual pathway for others in the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Sparks accomplished this through collaboration with two colleagues using computer-aided molecular design to essentially reverse-engineer the spinosyn structure ultimately demonstrating, for the first time ever, that the large macrocyclic structure could be mimicked by simpler, smaller synthetic motifs.”
Keith Wing, an independent industrial biochemistry consultant who was Hammock's second Ph.D student from UC Riverside and UC Davis (and who subsequently worked for Rohm and Haas Ag and DuPont Ag Chemicals and Central Research), also praised Sparks' accomplishments. "I've known Tom as a friend and colleague since 1976," Wing related. "We started our research in Bruce's lab working on proteins affecting juvenile hormone metabolism, but because of Bruce's/University of California's broad entomological and chemical training, we both developed multifaceted toxicological interests and methodological approaches to problems. As Tom and I were grinding through course and benchwork on our research, we were getting a skill set and thinking mode that was very unusual in both its scope and depth. I was always struck by Tom's creativity, dedication to his work and attention to detail. Much of my own thesis work was built on the precedents Tom set."
"Through the years Tom and I remained close personal friends and would discuss what we saw happening in the agrochemical industry, often through American Chemical Society AGRO division work," Wing said, lauding "Tom's variety and volume of contributions to insecticide science. For an industrial entomologist/biochemist, Tom is an unusually prolific contributor to both patent and scientific literature, and is an editor of relevant scientific journals."
"Tom is an excellent colleague to his peers and mentor to younger scientists in our field," Wing said, "and has made huge societal contributions, such as his work in the Insecticide Resistance Action Committee (IRAC), providing discipline and structure in an important area of agricultural science."
Sparks is the second Hammock lab alumnus to receive the coveted Nan-Yao Su Award. ESA selected Bryony Bonning, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Hammock lab and now a professor at Iowa State University, for the award in 2013. Walter Leal, former chair of the entomology department and now a UC Davis distinguished professor with the UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, won the award in 2011.
(Editor's Note: See list of other 2021 ESA winners)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
“I was thrilled to be invited to write this perspectives/review of my scientific career; it is a collection of 30 years of single-minded focus on one question,” said Page, who is renowned for his research on honey bee behavior and population genetics, particularly the evolution of complex social behavior, and for his work on the first genomic map of the honey bee.
"The editors contacted me to write a perspectives/review that focuses on my own work, a study in complex adaptation,” Page related. “This is the first time they have done a perspectives article like this. I was, of course, honored. More than half of the work was done at UC Davis.”
“Understanding the organization and evolution of social complexity is a major task because it requires building an understanding of mechanisms operating at different levels of biological organization from genes to social interactions,” Page wrote in his abstract. “I discuss here, a unique forward genetic approach spanning more than 30 years beginning with human-assisted colony-level selection for a single social trait, the amount of pollen honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) store. The goal was to understand a complex social trait from the social phenotype to genes responsible for observed trait variation.”
“The approach,” Page wrote, “combined the results of colony-level selection with detailed studies of individual behavior and physiology resulting in a mapped, integrated phenotypic architecture composed of correlative relationships between traits spanning anatomy, physiology, sensory response systems, and individual behavior that affect individual foraging decisions. Colony-level selection reverse engineered the architecture of an integrated phenotype of individuals resulting in changes in the social trait. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) studies combined with an exceptionally high recombination rate (60 kb/cM), and a phenotypic map, provided a genotype–phenotype map of high complexity demonstrating broad QTL pleiotropy, epistasis, and epistatic pleiotropy suggesting that gene pleiotropy or tight linkage of genes within QTL integrated the phenotype. Gene expression and knockdown of identified positional candidates revealed genes affecting foraging behavior and confirmed one pleiotropic gene, a tyramine receptor, as a target for colony-level selection that was under selection in two different tissues in two different life stages. The approach presented here has resulted in a comprehensive understanding of the structure and evolution of honey bee social organization.”
Page, who received his doctorate in entomology (1980) from UC Davis, joined the UC Davis entomology faculty in 1989, and chaired the department from 1999-2004. In 2004, Arizona State University recruited him as founding director of its School of Life Sciences. His career advanced from dean of Life Sciences, to vice provost and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to university provost. Today he holds the titles of ASU provost emeritus, ASU Regents professor emeritus, and UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor, an award bestowed in 2019.
At UC Davis, Page worked closely with Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., (the father of honey bee genetics) for whom the university's bee facility is named.
For 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, Page maintained a UC Davis honey bee-breeding program, managed by bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. Together they discovered a link between social behavior and maternal traits in bees.
Page has authored than 250 research papers, including five books: among them, The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution, published by Harvard University Press in 2013. His most recent book is The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies, published by Oxford University Press 2020. (See news release on why bees are both artists and engineers.)
Page is a highly cited author on such topics as Africanized bees, genetics and evolution of social organization, sex determination, and division of labor in insect societies.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
In announcing the winner of the international competition, Professor Christopher John Smith, editor-in-chief of the journal Foods, described Zhang as a “rising star in the field of food science and technology.”
Zhang focuses his research on foods for health and wellness with an emphasis on the roles of bioactive lipids in colonic inflammation and colon cancer. He served as a postdoc in the Hammock laboratory from 2010 to 2013.
“This is fantastic news,” said Hammock, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. “I am so pleased over the award recognizing Guodong for his contributions to nutrition, cancer and gastrointestinal health. Since graduate school, he has based his work on innovative physiology, nutrition, and biochemistry, with all studies on a firm analytical basis. In our laboratory, he was the perfect postdoctoral fellow, bringing new technologies to UC Davis and rapidly integrating into UC Davis projects."
"Guodong was broadly collaborative at Davis and internationally,” Hammock noted. "He was a wonderful mentor and colleague to others in the lab while here, and has continued since, leaving not only to collaborate here but to forge wonderful international collaborations. Guodong is a star in all ways. He sent us two outstanding postgraduate scientists Yuxin Wang and Weicang Wang (trained in Zhang's UMass lab), who, like their mentor, have been wonderfully innovative and productive scientists at Davis.”
As the award recipient, Zhang will receive an honorarium of 2000 Swiss francs, or $2,206 in American funds; publication of a peer-reviewed paper in Foods; and an engraved plaque.
Zhang has an “outstanding publication record, comprising 73 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and 4 international patents,” said Smith, who also called attention to his grants. Zhang serves as the principal investigator (PI) of grants totaling $1.7 million, and he is the co-PI of grants totaling $5.1 million. “This is an outstanding achievement in today's competitive environment,” Smith said.
Guodong holds a bachelor of science degree in chemistry (2003) from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, and a master's degree in chemistry (2005) from the National University of Singapore. He received his doctorate in food science in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the Hammock laboratory, "my research was about bioactive lipids on angiogenesis and cancer," Guodong said. Reflecting on his years in the Hammock lab, he said: "During this period, 2010-2013, I received comprehensive training in pharmacology and oncology. I really want to thank the mentorship and support from Dr. Hammock: for taking the time to discuss the experiments, provide career advice, help me with personal issues, and hike together in the Bay Area. The days in Davis are some of my best life moments.”
Zhang joined the faculty of the UMass Department of Food Science as an assistant professor in 2013, and in 2014, joined the faculty of the UMass Molecular and Cell Biology Program. In 2019, he advanced to associate professor with tenure.
The recipient of a number of high honors and awards, Zhang won the 2020 Samuel Cate Prescott Award from the Institute of Food Technologists, and the 2019 Young Scientist Research Award from the American Oil Chemists' Society.
Foods is an international, scientific, peer-reviewed, open access journal of food science and is published monthly online by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI).
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The 10 Fellows were announced today.
Hoover, who received her doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in June, 1997, studied with major professors Sean Duffey (1943-1997) and Bruce Hammock. Hoover joined the PSU faculty as an assistant professor in 1998, achieving full professor in 2010.
Hoover's areas of expertise include biology and ecology of invasive species, insect-microbial symbiosis, tritrophic interactions, insect virology, and pollination of forest trees.
She is active in PSU's Center for Chemical Ecology, Center for Pollinator Research, and the Insect Biodiversity Center.
“Hoover is internationally recognized for uncovering detailed mechanisms of how phytochemicals reduce mortality by baculoviruses through physiological impacts on the larva's midgut (epithelial cells and peritrophic matrix,” said nominator Gary Felton, professor and head of the PSU Department of Entomology. Hoover and her co-advisors “patented baculovirus formulation additives that counteract these physiological effects, and thus increase the sensitivity of larvae to infections.”
“Kelli was a delight to have in the laboratory at UC Davis,” said Hammock, now a UC Davis distinguished professor who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. “She started her Ph.D. at Davis at an exciting time when we were trying to move recombinant baculoviruses into practical agriculture as green pesticides. Among the laboratories of Sean Duffey, Susumu Maeda, Kevin Heinz and extramural collaborators around the world, we had an exciting critical mass ranging, including virology, peptide chemistry, scorpion venoms, genetic engineering, pest management and others.”
“Kelli's interest in tritrophic interactions and her outgoing and engaging personality were just what was needed to pull the team together,” said Hammock, a 2010 Fellow. “As one would expect, Kelli's talents in science and leadership have served her well at Penn State. There her baculovirus work transitioned into a broader program in gypsy moth control and the invasion of the Asian longhorned beetle provided an opportunity to look at gut symbionts. Every project that Kelli touches seems to yield exciting results with practical implications. I am thrilled that the ESA has recognized what a star she is in our field.”
UC Davis doctoral alumnus Bryony Bonning, a professor at the University of Florida and a 2013 ESA Fellow, commented that “Kelli is so deserving of this award.”
“I worked with Kelli for two, delightful years at UC Davis, and was particularly impressed by the number of undergraduate students that she managed to mentor at the bench!” Bonning said. “Since then, she has established a stellar research program that has recently focused on both the fundamental biology and management solutions for invasive pests including Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) and spotted lantern fly. Analysis of ALB semiochemicals resulted in a blend now sold by two companies and used in North America and Europe for ALB management."
“In collaboration with engineers, she has also spearheaded development of a method to prevent introduction of invasive species in the wood packing associated with international shipments,” Bonning noted. “This dielectric heating technology, used to treat and kill insects hidden in the wood packing, is at the stage of commercial equipment prototype. These examples reflect both the interdisciplinary breadth of Kelli's research program and the seamless melding of science to address fundamental questions that lead to practical solutions. This breadth of scope and ability to identify commercially useful components of the system is a relatively rare phenotype among entomologists! Further, Kelli is driven to engage the necessary parties (scientists, stakeholders, policy makers) toward implementation of strategies to prevent or manage the impact of invasive species on U.S. agriculture."
In his nomination letter, Felton, a 2014 ESA Fellow, said that Hoover excels in research, teaching, and service. “There are three key attributes that stand out in Dr. Hoover's research contributions: interdisciplinary, collaborative, and integrative,” he wrote. “Hoover's program encompasses research, education, outreach and service related to the biology of and solutions for invasive species threats, in forest, ornamental, and agricultural systems. She integrates basic and applied research in multi-trophic interactions, microbial symbioses, invasion biology, and insect physiology.”
For 19 years, Hoover has collaborated with industrial engineers and national and international regulatory agencies “to develop a novel technology (patents pending) to reduce the risk of pathways that can introduce alien forest pests through international trade,” Felton wrote. “She has used her studies to create a platform for education and training of a diverse group of undergraduates, graduate students, and post-graduate scholars. Since Hoover's interdisciplinary approach allows her to interact with and serve as a bridge between multiple disciplines and diverse stakeholders, she has initiated broad networking opportunities for members of these communities by organizing and leading multi-disciplinary research teams, symposia, and international conferences.”
Asian Longhorned Beetle, Gypsy Moth
“The vast majority of Hoover's studies focuses on basic and applied research on invasive species, such as the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) and gypsy moth and most recently the spotted lanternfly,” Felton wrote. “Hoover and collaborators investigated semiochemical communication in ALB in an effort to help regulatory agencies detect and monitor ALB in the field, especially at low densities. Hoover and colleagues took the male-produced volatile sex pheromone (discovered by USDA/ARS) and conducted years of basic lab and field research to produce a commercially available ALB lure (pheromones and kairomones) and trapping system, which primarily captures virgin females. The blend developed by Hoover and her team is sold by two major pheromone companies and has been used in North America, Germany, Britain, Switzerland and Italy. She and collaborators also characterized behavioral responses to a putative female-produced trail pheromone that elicits following behavior by males.”
Hoover is also heavily involved in preventing the introduction of invasive species. Her research draws support from governmental grant programs, commodity groups and the private sector. She is currently the principal investigator or co-PI on grants totaling $10 million, with $1.62 million directly supporting her program, Felton said, adding that she has actively collaborated with researchers in Europe, China, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Felton described her as “an effective educator and mentor of the next generation of scientists.”
She has mentored 43 undergraduates, 11 PhD and 10 masters students, and 13 postdoctoral scholars, “many of whom have received prestigious awards and fellowships.”
High Impact Interdisciplinary Research
“While making new discoveries through basic research, she continues to strive to apply the outcomes of that research by actively engaging other scientists, stakeholder groups, and policymakers within Pennsylvania, nationally, and globally to make a difference -- to prevent and/or manage the consequences of invasive species on our ecosystems,” Felton wrote. “Her ability to conduct high impact interdisciplinary research and integrate transformational and translation research is truly outstanding.”
Born in Lubbock, Texas, but raised in the south San Francisco area,Kelli received her bachelor of science degree in 1979 from UC Berkeley, with honors, majoring in the biology of natural resources. She obtained her master's degree in biology, with an emphasis on entomology, from San Jose State University in 1992 before joining the doctoral program at UC Davis. After a year as a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, she joined the faculty in the Department of Entomology at PSU in 1998.
Active in ESA since 1996, Hoover has judged student competitions at 10 national meetings. She has organized numerous national or branch meeting symposia and served as a subject editor for Environmental Entomology. She chaired or co-chaired organizing committees for three annual meetings of the International Society for Invertebrate Pathology and held the office of treasurer for four years.
Fellows of ESA are individuals who have made outstanding contributions to entomology— via research, teaching, extension, administration, military service, and public engagement and science policy —and whose career accomplishments serve to inspire all entomologists, according to the ESA, a worldwide organization with a membership of some 7000.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
“This is the first paper documenting induction/stimulation of pollen germination by non-plants,” said Christensen, a doctoral candidate in the Microbiology Graduate Group who joined the Vannette lab in January 2019. “Nectar-dwelling Acinetobacter bacteria, commonly found in flowers, stimulate protein release by inducing pollen to germinate and burst, benefitting Acinetobacter.”
The article, “Nectar Bacteria Stimulate Pollen Germination and Bursting to Enhance Microbial Fitness,” is online July 28 and will be in print in the Oct. 11th edition of the journal Current Biology.
Christensen, who co-authored the paper with community ecologist and associate professor Vannette, and former Vannette lab member Ivan Munkres, collected California poppies, Eschscholzia californica, from the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, and Acinetobacter primarily from the Stebbens Cold Canyon Reserve, a unit the UC Natural Reserve System that encompasses the Blue Ridge Berryessa Natural Area in Solano and Napa counties.
The question—“How do organisms actually eat pollen?”--has been a long-standing one, Vannette said, “because pollen is well-protected by a layers of very resistant biopolymers and it's unclear how pollen-eaters get through those protective layers.”
“The finding that bacteria--in this case a specific genus of bacteria-- can cause premature pollen germination and release of nutrients-- is cool for a number of reasons,” said Vannette, a UC Davis Hellman Fellow. “First, Shawn's results are very novel--no one has described this phenomenon before! Second, Acinetobacter is a genus of bacteria that are very common in flowers. They are usually among the most abundant bacteria in nectar and are often found on other floral tissues, including pollen, stigmas etc.”
Christensen, an evolutionary biologist turned microbiologist, studies Acinetobacter and other nectar microbes and their potential influences on pollen for nutrient procurement, as well as the metabolomics of solitary bee pollen provisions.
The UC Davis doctoral student is a recipient of two research awards: the Maurer-Timm Student Research Grant, a UC Davis award for research conducted in the Natural Reserves; and a Davis Botanical Society research award, specifically for this project.
Shawn holds a bachelor of science degree in evolutionary biology from University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I studied reducing ecological impacts of phosphorus runoff, ethnobotany and domestication traits in Brassica rapa, botanical field excursions of all kinds, the evolution of chemical sets in the early origins of life, and now plant-microbe-pollinator interactions."