Year of Honorary Fellowship, 2020
Stuart Reynolds is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Bath. Born in Yorkshire but growing up in Lancashire, he studied at Cambridge and did his PhD there too, working in the laboratory of Simon Maddrell on the stretchiness of insect cuticle. After a postdoc at Bristol with Charles Neville, he was lucky enough to win a Harkness Fellowship that took him to Seattle, USA, where he worked on the control of moulting with his heroes Jim Truman and Lynn Riddiford. Returning to the UK in 1977 he took up a lectureship at Bath, where he has been ever since, working on all sorts of insect-related research problems, but especially the antagonistic co-evolutionary interactions between insects and their specialist pathogens. Now retired, he is currently pottering about thinking about the evolution of metamorphosis and the evolution of host and vector ranges in parasites. He comments that he has always been interested in too many things at once and doesn’t see why he should stop now. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society since 1974 and organized a number of meetings for the Society including the memorable 2014 European Congress of Entomology at York. He was RES President in 2010-2012. He lives in rural Somerset, where he lives in a crumbling old house and likes gardening very much.
