Barry Pittendrigh

Barry Robert Pittendrigh is a Canadian-American molecular biologist, researcher and educator. He holds the John V. Osmun Endowed Chair and is the director of the Center for Urban and Industrial Pest Management at Purdue University.

Early life and education Pittendrigh was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he went to Thom Collegiate. He received his B.Sc. Honours in Biology from University of Regina in 1990. Later he moved to the United States, where he received his M.S. in Entomology from Purdue University in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Entomology from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. He completed his post-doctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, in 2000.

Career In 2000, Pittendrigh joined Purdue University as an assistant professor in the Department Entomology, becoming associate professor in 2004. In 2008, he left Purdue University and joined University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was both a professor and held the C.W. Kearns, C.L. Metcalf and W.P. Flint Endowed Chair in Insect Toxicology. Pittendrigh left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016 to join Michigan State University, where he held an MSU Foundation Professor position. and is the Director of the Center for Urban and Industrial Pest Management.

Research and work Pittendrigh has used Drosophila melanogaster as a model system to understand how organisms respond to dietary factors or drugs, or evolve resistance to xenobiotics such as pesticides. Most notably his research has used genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic approaches to understand the evolution of resistance to pesticides. He was the lead author on the White Paper that was funded by NIH for the sequencing of the body louse genome.

In 2008, an insect species, Myrsidea pittendrighi was named in "honor of Barry Pittendrigh in recognition of his efforts to organize and obtain the first complete sequences of a louse genome, which will be a great asset to work on the systematics of lice."

In 2011, Pittendrigh and collaborator Julia Bello-Bravo, launched Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO), a program focused on taking expert knowledge and placing it into a video animation format, where the content can be placed into numerous languages.

Awards and honors 2013 – Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement for the Scientific Animations Without Borders program 2015 – Innovation Celebration: Social Venture Award for Scientific Animations Without Borders 2016 – John V. Osmun Award Alumni Professional Achievement Award, Purdue University

Selected publications