Marcos Kogan, ESA Fellow (2016)

Dr. Marcos Kogan, professor emeritus of agricultural entomology, University of Illinois (UIUC), and professor emeritus of entomology, Oregon State University (OSU), was elected as Fellow in 2016. His research focused on the interactions of insects and plants, and mechanisms of constitutive and induced plant resistance to herbivores. He is recognized for work linking ecological theory with integrated pest management (IPM) practice. With emphasis on soybean entomology, he promoted IPM in South America, Africa, and Asia.

Born in 1933 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Kogan began collecting and identifying insects at age 10. At the age of 20, he married and spent the next four years in Israel. He worked in the fields of a collective farm, gaining appreciation for challenges of practical crop production. His later academic work was firmly rooted within this real-world experience. Kogan returned to Brazil and earned an agronomy degree from the Universidade Rural do Rio de Janeiro in 1961. After graduation, he was appointed biologist of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (IOC) in Rio. During that period, he published papers on the biology and taxonomy of Coleoptera and Strepsiptera, and the biology of tomato and citrus pests. In 1966, with a Guggenheim Fellowship, he pursued a Ph.D. degree in entomology and biological control from the University of California, Riverside, graduating in 1968. The following year, after a short postdoctoral project at UC-Riverside on the taxonomy of a house-fly parasitoid complex, Kogan joined the Illinois Natural History Survey and UIUC. In 1991 he became director of the Integrated Plant Protection Center (IPPC) at OSU. He retired from OSU in 2003. He remains active in retirement studying extant and fossil Strepsiptera and writing on the history of IPM.

Throughout his 55-year career, Kogan authored/edited six books, including the first comprehensive treaty on sampling arthropods in row crops. He co-authored the only IPM textbook integrating entomology, plant pathology, and weed science. In 200+ book chapters, refereed journal and conference papers, and extension publications, he covered a wide range of basic and applied entomology. At UIUC, he developed a comprehensive soybean IPM program with strong international components. At OSU he led IPPC to become a center of excellence in IPM integration; focused on the ecological foundations of IPM; and took a lead role in a proposal to implement an area-wide IPM program for the codling moth on pome fruit crops in the three western U.S. states. The program, the first funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), served as model for future area-wide IPM projects in the country. For his work, Kogan received several honors, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, an honorary doctorate from his Brazilian alma mater, a USDA-ARS recognition award for technology transfer, and awards from the Brazilian Entomological Society and the Brazilian Soybean Congress for contributions to IPM in Brazil. In 2000 he received the ESA Founders Memorial Award honoring L.D. Newsom.

Kogan has been married for 63 years to Jenny, a librarian and close collaborator; they have two children and three grandsons.

(updated November, 2016)