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Richard has been interested in insects since the age of 7 when he accidentally caught a butterfly in a crab net and identified it as a large white (Pieris brassicae) from a Brooke Bond tea card he had acquired that morning. He graduated in Zoology and Applied Entomology at Imperial College and then hopped over the fence to the Natural History Museum where he did his PhD on sexual morph production in aphids. The day after his PhD grant finished he started work on aphids at Rothamsted, the world’s oldest and greatest agricultural research station at Harpenden in Hertfordshire, and has been there now for 30 years. He heads the Rothamsted Insect Survey which runs trap networks providing long-term data on many insects, especially moths and aphids. These data are used for a range of fundamental and applied studies, and are especially suited to statistical analyses of the impacts of climate change on seasonality, abundance and distribution. He is Deputy Science Director of Rothamsted’s Centre for Bioenergy and Climate Change, and has been Vice President of the Royal Entomological Society (2008-9). He recently paid £20 for an aphid in amber, which was advertised on eBay. It turned out to be an undescribed species and was named Mindarus harringtoni Heie. He is proud of being an old fossil.

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