Victory in the War on Bugs

Insecticides kill pests. Simple, right? Wrong. Even as they kill, insecticides drive evolution, because only toxin-resistant individuals survive and reproduce. This accelerated evolution means that when insecticides are overused they can quickly become useless. Conundrums like this keep Dave Crowder busy. A Ph.D. candidate in the UA's Entomology Program, Crowder uses mathematical models and experiments to study how crop-destroying whitefly populations might dwindle or thrive in various farming scenarios. His research helps determine how best to control these and other pests and is helping to rank UA entomology #2 among all major U.S. research universities in the most recent Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index.