York Lecturer Series

Dr. Hans Rudolf Herren, Chief Executive and Director General of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, Kenya, Africa, is one of the most outstanding crop protection scientists in the world.

In 1995, he was named World Food Prize Laureate for advancing human development by improving the quality, quantity, and availability of the world's food supply. The World Food Prize, created by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug, is the foremost award in agriculture, food, and human nutrition.

Herren was awarded the prize for his work on controlling the cassava mealybug in Africa. Cassava is a staple root crop for more than 200 million African people. An introduced pest, the cassava mealybug threatened to destroy this important food crop, creating a food emergency across the continent. Herren's efforts to relieve this disaster provided one of the most outstanding examples of classical biological control in the world.

As Director of the Biological Control Program at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria, Herren developed and implemented, with a team of 30 scientists, one of the world's largest biological control programs. The cassava mealybug was identified and then found in South America, where it was so completely under the control of natural enemies that it had never been noticed before. Its natural enemies were quarantined, studied, and the most promising reared in mass numbers. New techniques for mass rearing insects were pioneered in this program. The natural enemies were then released by a novel aerial insect release system, fitted into leased aircraft and flown across Africa to reach the most remote sites.

Thirty countries eventually benefited from this control program. Today, cassava mealybug and its natural enemies coexist in low-level equilibrium across Africa, ensuring lasting biological control of this pest without further inputs.

In 1992, Herren became Director of IITA's Plant Health Management Division in Benin and, in 1994, accepted the position of Chief Executive and Director General of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya. At ICIPE, Herren restructured the organization and developed a new research agenda that covers agriculture, health, and the environment.

In addition to the World Food Prize, Herren has received numerous other awards. In 1991, he received the Sir and Lady Rank Prize for Nutrition from Mrs. Margaret Thatcher in London. He also received the Merit Award for Outstanding Service to Crop Protection from the XII International Plant Protection Congress at Rio de Janeiro; the Kilby Award for Extraordinary Contribution to Society Through Science, Technology, Innovation, Invention and Education; the King Baudoin Award for research and control of the cassava mealybug; the Plaque of Appreciation from the African Association of Insect Scientists in recognition of extraordinary contributions to entomology in Africa; and the Parasitis 86 Award for the planning and implementation of the world's largest biological control project.

Herren is Editor in Chief of Insect Science and Its Application and is a member of the Editorial Board of Biological Control Science and Technology. He is also a member of the Entomological Society of America, African Association of Insect Scientists, International Organization of Biological Control, New York Academy of Science, American Institute of Biological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is the author of some 80 scientific publications.

A native of Switzerland, he grew up on a farm in the lower Rhone Valley near Lake Geneva. He received his bachelor's degree from the Humboldtianum in Bern and his master's and doctorate degrees in agricultural sciences from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His doctoral research on larch bud moth biological control in the Swiss Alps was a pioneering study of insect population manipulations. The research project on the larch bud moth population ecology, which Herren's thesis research contributed to, is found today in most ecology books as an example of the long-term cyclical phenomenon structuring ecological systems.

Herren speaks three languages: French, German, and English.

He is married to Dr. Barbara Gemmill. They have three children. Their home base away from Kenya is near Davis, California. They have a small farm in Capay Valley where they someday hope to have time to raise grapes, walnuts, and sheep--all by organic methods, of course.