May Berenbaum
May Berenbaum is an American entomologist specialising in plant-insect interactions.
After graduating in biology from Yale University in 1975, she became interested in entomology and chemical ecology and completed her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University in 1980.
She began her research in the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she has taught, and which she has directed, since 1992. She has held the Swanlund Chair in Entomology since 1996.
May Berenbaum is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and president of the National Research Council Committees, Future of Pesticides in U.S. Agriculture (2000) and the Committee on the Status of Pollinators in North America (2007). She is also a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science by President Obama at the White House in 2014.
May Berenbaum is known for clarifying the chemical mechanisms of interactions between insect herbivores. She has also studied the adverse effects of agricultural practices and pesticides on honeybees following colony collapse. Her work has far-reaching implications for agriculture and the environment, particularly with regard to safe and sustainable food production.
In terms of scientific publications, May Berenbaum has authored 411 articles in Scopus (h-index 66, 17,000 citations), as well as 35 book chapters. She is also involved in the promotion of scientific culture: she has published numerous magazine articles and is the author of six books on insects. Since 2018, she has been editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world's most highly cited multidisciplinary American scientific publications, which publishes, among other things, the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences.
She is very active in environmental advocacy, particularly in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate change, and is the recipient of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (2011). She is also known as the organiser of the Insect Fear Film Festival, a festival of insect-themed horror films.
