W. Joe Lewis

W. Joe Lewis, born in rural Mississippi to a sharecropper family, earned a doctorate in entomology from Mississippi State University at age twenty-four and spent his career from 1967 until his 2006 retirement as a research entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in Tifton, Georgia, holding joint faculty appointments with the University of Georgia and the University of Florida. He is recognized worldwide for major discoveries in the fundamental science of pest management, studying the behavioral and chemical interactions among parasitoid insects, insect herbivores and plants within broader ecosystem principles. In 2008 he shared the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for discoveries of mechanisms governing plant-insect and plant-plant interactions that fostered the development of integrated pest management and advanced agricultural sustainability.