Stuart Reynolds
Stuart has recently become President of the Royal Entomological Society (2010–2012). He is Professor of Biology at the University of Bath: he lives in farming country in Somerset and has worked at the University since 1977. He is co-editor of the Journal of Insect Physiology. His research is focused on the interactions between insects and microbes, and he works mainly with large caterpillars – especially those of the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta. More widely, he is interested in ‘how insects work’ – particularly the effects of insect diseases and the influence of insect genetics. He is extremely concerned about how the growing human population of the planet is to be fed in the future, and about how to manage the competition between insects and people for food. He believes that knowledge about insect infection and immunity will help us to develop safer and more effective ways of controlling insects that are pests of agricultural crops and vectors of human disease. However, like all entomologists, he likes insects a lot and doesn’t want to concentrate solely on how to kill the ones that compete with or attack humans. So he is also interested in how insects interact with microbes in more benign ways – for example, some insects eat fungi, while others co-operate symbiotically with microbes so that they can survive on unpromising food sources such as wood.