NRI's Visiting Professor of Insect Behaviour, Glyn Vale, has been awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list. Glyn, who is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, receives the award "for services to controlling and eradicating tsetse flies in Africa", a task to which he has devoted most of his professional effort and expertise for four decades.
Glyn Vale is currently a very active Visiting Professor at NRI, and he has for many years worked with NRI's applied research entomologists as a collaborator and consultant on the management of tsetse fly as a major disease vector in Africa. His initial research, starting in the late 1960s, focused on the improvement of tsetse trapping methods for assessing the effectiveness of baiting techniques for tsetse, and the unobtrusive electrocuting grids that he developed showed that previous methods had produced misleading results and that odour attraction was far more important than previously believed. Since then he has worked with many other researchers in Africa and Europe to improve 100-fold the cost-effectiveness of artificial baiting of tsetse, and to develop integrated management systems based on a combination of artificial baits and selective insecticide-dipping of cattle. Where these approaches have been implemented, they have removed the need for the former widespread annual spraying with DDT. The beneficial environmental impact of this work won Prof. Vale recognition by the World Technology Network in 2003 when he was announced as a Finalist in the World Technology Awards for the Environment.
NRI is delighted to congratulate Glyn on the award of an OBE for his major contribution to the control and eradication of tsetse in Africa. It is a fitting recognition of the many years of distinguished service he has devoted to scientific research and development to combat this vector of the fatal diseases of sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in livestock.