Doctoral candidate and ant specialist Brendon Boudinot of the Phil Ward lab received the prestigious John Henry Comstock Award at the Entomological Society of America's recent annual meeting, held in St. Louis, Mo.

Each branch of ESA singles out one graduate student for the coveted award. The Pacific Branch of ESA (PBESA), earlier announced the award, its highest graduate student award. PBESA encompasses 11 Western states, U.S. territories, and parts of Canada and Mexico. 

ESA president Robert Peterson, a professor at Montana State University, presented the award to Boudinot.

Boudinot excels in academics, leadership, public service activities, professional activities, and publications.  “A highly respected scientist, teacher and leader with a keen intellect, unbridled enthusiasm, and an incredible penchant for public service, Brendon maintains a 4.00 grade point average; has published 12 outstanding publications on insect systematics (some are landmarks or ground-breaking publications); and engages in exceptional academic, student and professional activities,”  wrote nominator Steve Nadler, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Despite being at an early stage of his academic career, Boudinot has already published several landmark papers on insect systematics, wrote Phil Ward. "This includes a remarkable article, just published in Arthropod Structure & Development, in which Brendon presents a comprehensive theory of genital homologies across all Hexapoda (Boudinot 2018). Based on careful comparative morphological study and conducted within a phylogenetic framework, this paper is a major contribution to the field and is destined to become a “classic." This could have been a decade-long study by any investigator, and yet it is just one chapter of Brendon's thesis!"

Active in PBESA and ESA, Boudinot received multiple “President's Prize” awards for his research presentations at national ESA meetings. He organized the ESA symposium, “Evolutionary and Phylogenetic Morphology,” at the 2018 meeting in Vancouver, B.C. , and delivered a presentation on “Male Ants: Past, Present and Prospects” at the 2016 International Congress of Entomology meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Boudinot served on—and anchored—three of the UC Davis Linnaean Games teams that won national or international ESA championships. The Linnaean Games are a lively question-and-answer, college bowl-style competition on entomological facts played between university-sponsored student teams. He also participated on the UC Linnaean Games Team this year in St. Louis.

Boudinot has served as president of the UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association since 2006, and is active in the campuswide UC Davis Picnic Day; he has co-chaired the department's  Picnic Day Committee since 2017.

Other UC Davis recipients of PBESA's John Henry Comstock Award:

• 2015: Mohammad-Amir Aghaee (major professor the late Larry Godfrey). He is now a research entomologist with Bayer Crop Science, Union City, Tenn.
• 2014: Kelly Hamby (major professor Frank Zalom). She is now on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park.
• 2013: Matan Shelomi (major professor Lynn Kimsey). He is now on the faculty of the National Taiwan University, Tapei.
• 2008: Christopher Barker (major professor William Reisen). He is now on the faculty of the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
• 1983: Elaine Backus (major professor the late Donald McLean). She is research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in Parlier

The award memorializes John Henry Comstock (1849-1931), an American entomologist, researcher and educator known for his studies of scale insects and butterflies and moths, which provided the basis for systematic classification. Comstock was a member of the faculty of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., for most of his career, except for his service as a chief entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1879-81).