BES Facebook pageBES Annual Meeting 2010
7 - 9 September,
University of Leeds, UK
Presidential Address
Wednesday 8 September
We are pleased to announce that the BES President, Professor H. Charles J. Godfray, MA, PhD, FRS, will be giving this distinguished Address. Keep up to date with the Presidential Address, the BES Lecture and the Thematic Topics by watching the BES blog!
Title: Mosquitoes, malaria & ecology
There has been renewed interest in recent years in controlling major insect vector-borne diseases such as malaria by targeting the insect. In part this is due to a realisation that using drugs to treat the disease in humans is not a panacea, and in part because advances in insect molecular biology have suggested possible new genetic interventions to control vector densities. In this talk I shall argue that controlling insect vectors and the diseases they carry is applied ecology and a greater emphasis on the ecological aspects of the problem is critical for integrated control measures to succeed. For example, we still know surprisingly little about the ecology of the major insect vectors of malaria in Africa, what they eat and how their populations are regulated. I shall describe recent novel ideas for controlling the mosquito vectors of malaria, and explore how the ecological sciences can assist in their deployment.
Academic Background:
Charles read Zoology at Oxford between 1976 and 1979 and moved to Imperial College to do a PhD (1983) in community ecology; he remained at Imperial as a post doc until 1985 (including a six-month spell working on a biological control project in South-east Asia), when he returned to the Zoology Department at Oxford as Demonstrator in Ecology. In 1987, Charles went back to Imperial as a lecturer, and remained there until 2006, throughout based on the Silwood Park Campus. From 1999 he was Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology and from 2005 Head of the Division of Biology. Charles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and became the President of the British Ecological Society in 2009.
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