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Brian Farrell is professor of biology in the Department
of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and curator in entomology
in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
Farrell’s integrative studies of DNA sequences, morphology,
fossils, and ecology changed the way people look at insect-plant
coevolution. For 40 years, coevolution was studied by measuring
the present-day adaptations of insects and plants to each
other, without knowing whether these evolved recently or
long ago or whether changes in ecology had long-term evolutionary
consequences. Farrell’s work has shown that insects
and plants have in fact evolved and diversified in response
to each other, over a shared 250 million-year history. For
example, the associations of many insect lineages that today
attack such ancient plants as cycads and conifers themselves
date back before the rise of dinosaurs, while the later
origins of flowering plants spurred dramatic increases in
insect diversification. Farrell has also shown that plants
that escape insects by evolving specialized defenses then
diversify more rapidly than before. Even recent insect/plant
assemblages such as the insects that eat the milkweeds so
common in American fields have undergone an apparent arms
race in defenses and counter-defenses between them. Farrell’s
most recent work extends these findings to other small consumers
such as fungi, parasitic worms and viruses, with implications
for medical research.
Farrell also serves as curator in entomology in the Museum
of Comparative Zoology, where he and a very talented staff
oversee the care and digitization of several million specimens
of insects, half of which are beetles. Farrell’s
crew pioneers the e-type initiative, a global effort to
place high-resolution images and data from major collections
on the Internet, repatriating the information to the countries
hosting the major part of global biodiversity. To further
this cause onsite, Farrell spent the academic year 2002-2003
on sabbatical in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where
he has established a state of the art bioinformatics center
with Dominican students and staff at the National Botanical
Gardens (Jardín Botánico Nacional). His
Dominican students capture images and habitat information
from specimens in the national insect and plant collections
and from specimens newly collected on expeditions and
enters them into a free, searchable online database that
is the heart of a virtual
museum and encyclopedia of biodiversity.
Farrell also serves on the Policy and the Planning Committees
of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
He received a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of
Maryland in 1991 and a B.A. in zoology from the University
of Vermont in 1981.
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