Dr. David Andow, ESA Fellow (2019)

Dr. David Andow, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Entomology, University of Minnesota, was elected as Fellow in 2019. He is internationally known for his research on insect population and community ecology, risk assessment of invasive species and genetic engineering, and management of resistance in insects.

Professor Andow was born in Ohio and attended Brown University, majoring in biology (Sc.B., magna cum laude). He obtained his Ph.D. in ecology and evolution at Cornell University (1982) under the direction of David Pimentel and Simon Levin, investigating the ecological mechanisms affecting insect response to vegetational diversity. He then received a National Science Foundation postdoc to study rice insects with Keizi Kiritani at the National Institute of Agro-Environmental Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan. Following this, he had a short postdoc at Cornell reviewing the environmental risks of genetic engineering. He took his present position in 1984 and serves on the graduate faculties of entomology, ecology, conservation biology, sustainable agriculture, and natural resource policy and management.

Andow's research in insect ecology is diverse. His 1991 review on arthropod response to vegetational diversity has received over 1,600 citations and remains actively cited today. His work to extend the diffusion model for the spread of invasive species opened up basic and applied research to model and manage invasive species. His modelling work and reviews have influenced efforts to design and implement effective insect resistance management, and the F2 screen, which estimates resistance allele frequencies for recessive and nearly recessive resistance in natural populations, has been used worldwide. His publications in sustainable agriculture have supported the view that SA systems are highly integrated and insects play critically important roles. He led the early efforts to develop and implement the recovery of the federally endangered Karner blue butterfly, and he has published extensively on environmental risks of genetically engineered organisms and the ecology of natural enemies, especially coccinellids and Trichogramma wasps. More recently, he has worked on the landscape ecology of pentatomids as well as on the use of next-generation sequencing to understand food web structure.

Andow has published more than 193 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 92 book chapters, edited 13 books, co-authored seven consensus reports for national and international organizations, and given 242 invited presentations. He has graduated seven M.Sc. and 10 Ph.D. students and mentored nine postdoctoral/visiting scientists. He was the King/Chavez/Parks Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, and he won the Best Publication in Landscape Ecology from the International Association for Landscape Ecology. He was an OECD Fellow, a McMaster Fellow, a Japanese Society for the Advancement of Science Fellow, and a Bellagio Center Fellow. He has consulted for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (Vatican), World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, European Food Safety Authority, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Japan), U.S. National Academy of Sciences, USDA, and US-EPA.

His son Lucas is a double major in comparative literature and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, and his wife Debora is a research scientist in molecular entomology at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation.

(updated September 2019)