Peter W. Price: On the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Almost Everything Went Wrong

Abstract

Peter W. Price is Regents’ Professor Emeritus at Northern Arizona University and author of the classic textbook Insect Ecology . He was born 14 miles south of London in Carshalton Beeches in Surrey, England, on 17 April 1938 and attended Stanley Park Primary School and Sutton County Grammar School. Boyhood activities included Boy Scouts and natural history, with a preference for plants. In secondary school, he was a member of the soccer, boxing, and athletics teams. Each summer, his family camped near the north Devon coast on the southwest English peninsula. He served two years in the Royal Air Force as a radar technician in West Germany. Price earned his B.S. Honors (1962, Forestry) from University College of North Wales and his M.S. (1964, Forest Entomology) from the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He was then employed in the Canadian Forest Service as a research entomologist. He obtained his Ph.D. (1970, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) from Cornell University with a research focus on the coexistence of parasitoids on the Swaine jack pine sawfly. Following his Ph.D., Price was an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Entomology, University of Illinois, where research developed into the study of three trophic-level interactions between natural enemies, insect herbivores, and plants. In 1979, he joined the Museum of Northern Arizona as a research ecologist. The following year, he accepted a professorship in the Department of Biology, Northern Arizona University, where he retired in 2002. He published more than 200 research papers, with the most cited being his 1980 paper co-authored with his graduate students, “Interactions Among Three Trophic Levels,” which has been cited …