John Heraty, Ph.D., is professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). His research is on the evolution and classification of minute parasitic wasps belonging to the superfamily Chalcidoidea, many of which are important biological control agents with direct agricultural relevance. His scientific love is the ant-parasitic family Eucharitidae.
Heraty was born in Toronto, Ontario. He received his B.S. (1976) and M.S. (1984) degrees from the University of Guelph. From 1976 to 1986, he worked as a biological control research technician. He left that position for a Ph.D. with James Woolley, Ph.D., at Texas A&M University, graduating in 1990. He then held a Canadian NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University and the Canadian National Collection in Ottawa. In 1993, he held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and then a postdoctoral position at the USDA-SEL lab. He started at UCR in 1995 and was promoted to full professor in 2005.
His years as a biological control technician introduced him to both the amazing diversity of chalcid wasps, as well as their importance in the control of other insects. During that time, Lubomir Masner, Ph.D., showed him a vial of Eucharitidae from Trinidad, and that was all it took to divert him to the world of taxonomy, classification, and phylogenetics. Over his career, Heraty continued to study these odd parasitic wasps and describe new species and genera, document their immature stages and ant-host associations, and place this all within a phylogenetic framework using everything from morphology to advanced molecular techniques. He was an early pioneer in the higher classification of Chalcidoidea using molecular data, with a first paper in 1999 using 28S-D2 for a mere 109 species. In 2024, in collaboration with Jean-Yves Rasplus, Ph.D., a new phylogeny of Chalcidoidea was published with 433 taxa and 2054 loci using a combination of Anchored Hybrid Enrichment and ultraconserved elements. The results were used to revise the classification of Chalcidoidea and form the foundation for a new book, Chalcidoidea of the World, co-authored with Woolley in 2025.
Heraty has been a major advisor to 13 Ph.D. students, six M.Sc. students, and seven postdoctoral researchers and mentored a large number of undergraduate students. He is proud of the diversity of students supported in his laboratory, with a large number being women, Hispanic, African American, and Native American. In support of students, he has been the fundraiser for the ESA SysEB Graduate Student Travel Award (please donate) and initiated an undergraduate research experience endowment for entomology at UCR.
Heraty is a past Section A (SysEB) chair and a Governing Board member for ESA. He received numerous NSF awards that transformed our knowledge of Eucharitidae and Chalcidoidea, but all this could only have been done in collaboration with numerous excellent researchers. He is driven by a continued passion for field work, sampling his eucharitid wasps in more than 20 countries, with more to come.
He shares his life with Christiane Weirauch, and he has a wonderful daughter, Joanne, and grandson, Carson.