Professor John Mumford, Alumni Observer, 1975 Marshall Scholar

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John Mumford emigrated to the United States with his family from Australia in 1960, and grew up in Indiana and Massachusetts. He studied at Tufts and Purdue Universities, with a BS in Entomology in 1974. He worked for the Agricultural Extension Service in Indiana before coming to Britain as a Marshall Scholar in 1975 to study Applied Entomology at Imperial College London. After completing the Marshall Scholarship in 1978 he went to Lincoln University in New Zealand as a research fellow, and returned to Imperial College in 1979 as a lecturer in Biology.

He is now Professor of Natural Resource Management in the College's Centre for Environmental Policy. Much of his research career has involved work on tropical crop pests: cocoa and coconuts in SE Asia, cotton and desert locust in Africa, coffee in S America, and fruit crops in S Asia, the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Africa. He has helped to design area-wide eradication and suppression programmes for invasive insects in Australia, Brazil, Mauritius, St Helena, the Azores and the Seychelles, using sterile insects, traps and baits. He is presently carrying out research with the US Department of Agriculture and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on quarantine policy for international plant health services to reduce the risk from invasive species.

He is an amateur beekeeper.