Insect-Plant Interactions

About Elizabeth A. Bernays

Dr. Elizabeth Bernays is Professor of Entomology and Professor of Zoology at the University of California Berkeley. After receiving a B.S. with honors in 1962 at the University of Queensland Brisbane Australia she travelled in Europe and taught biology before studying for the M.Sc. and then Ph.D. at the University of London England. Her Ph.D. was a study of the hatching mechanism in the desert locust involving morphology physiology and behavior. From 1970 to 1983 Dr. Bernays was scientist senior scientist and then principal scientist in a British Government Research Institute involved with research on insect pests in developing countries. This institute is now called the Overseas Development Natural Resources Institute. During this period she worked in the laboratory on the physiological regulation of feeding behavior in grasshoppers and locusts and on the effects of various plant compounds on behavior and physiology of plant-feeding insects. In the field she worked on cassava pest biology in Nigeria and cereal resistance to insects in India. With Dr. R. F. Chapman she organized in 1978 the Fourth International Symposium on Plant-Insect Interactions and edited the resultant book on that topic. In 1983 Dr. Bernays moved to Berkeley where she works on a variety of topics in plant-insect interactions. She is in the Department of Entomology Division of Biological Control and the Department of Zoology. In the field of plant-insect interactions Dr. Bernays combines her physiological and behavioral experience with functional morphology and ecology to provide a multidisciplinary approach. Her major interests concern host range in phytophagous insects: functional and causal mechanisms of host choice; variation and the role of learning; chemical ecology of plants and insects; biological control of weeds. Dr. Bernays has published widely in international journals of ecology morphology behavior and physiology and is an assistant editor for the Journal of Chemical Ecology Journal of Insect Behavior and Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata. She has presented numerous papers in universities and institutes in the U.S. and Europe.