Dr. Angela E. Douglas is the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Insect Physiology and Toxicology at Cornell University. She received a B.A. in zoology from Oxford University in 1978, and a Ph.D. from Aberdeen University.
Angela was awarded a ten-year Royal Society Research Fellowship, during which she developed a research program on insect nutritional physiology of phloem-feeding insects. Her fellowship research included the first direct physiological evidence that symbiotic bacteria provide aphids with essential amino acids, nutrients in short supply in the aphid diet of plant phloem sap.
Following the fellowship, Angela was a faculty member at the University of York (UK) where she was promoted to a Personal Professorial Chair, and she took up her current position at Cornell University in 2008. Insect nutrition is central to her research, focusing especially on sugar and amino acid nutrition; and she has applied this research to investigate applied problems, including the causes of the mid-season population crash of aphid crop pests.
Angela also conducts research on how the nutrition and immune system of insects interact with symbiotic microorganisms, including the application of genomic data to model metabolic and signaling networks in insect-microbial interactions. Her research is built on the commitment to explain how insects work in terms of underlying molecular mechanisms, and to use this information to predict how insects interact with other organisms and the wider environment. This commitment has informed Angela’s writing of many scientific reviews and three books, including The Symbiotic Habit (2010), and it guides her teaching of students and outreach activities for school teachers and the wider community.
(updated July, 2011)