Dr. L.E. Gilbert

School of Biological Sciences

Section of Integrative Biology

Director: Brackenridge Field Laboratory

The University of Texas

Austin, TX 78712 512-471-4705, 471-3878 FAX

Biographical Sketch:

Lawrence E. Gilbert Jr. is Professor of Integrative Biology and Director of Brackenridge Field Laboratory and The University of Texas.

Born in Laredo in 1942, Larry is the son of a Presbyterian minister who served as a chaplain in the US Navy and in the Texas Department of Corrections, in addition to sojourns with many small town churches. Thus, Larry grew up all over Texas, attending ten different schools before HS graduation in West Colombia, Texas.

Through his growing up years, Larry’s anchor point was his maternal grandparents in Catarina, where he spent summers helping with his grandfather’s bee business (1100 hives scattered across ranches in Dimmit and Webb counties), and fall and winter breaks hunting. Through his South Texas relatives, Larry’s roots go back to Russel and Azubah Ward of the second Austin Colony, making him a 6th generation Texan. He considers the Texas brush country “home”.

Larry attended The University of Texas at Austin where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1966, with Special Honors in Botany. After a Fulbright Fellowship year at Oxford University in England he entered graduate school at Stanford University. His PhD, in population biology, was received from Stanford in 1971.

Larry began his academic career at UT Austin in 1971 starting as Assistant Professor of Zoology. He was chairman of UT’s Zoology department from 1990-1998 and has directed UT Field Stations (Brackenridge Field Laboratory and Stengl Biological Station) since 1980. Since 1975, 37 Ph.D students have received their degrees under Gilbert’s guidance, and he has supervised 19 post-doctoral researchers.

Larry and his research group have investigated many topics relating to the behavior, genetics and ecology of plant feeding insects, especially in Central America. In the last decade he and his research group have devoted increasing attention to understanding the ecology of invasive fire ants with special reference to their relationships with phorid fly parasites. Currently, Larry is working with colleagues in Argentina, and at USDA Gainesville, to find species of phorid fly which will have the greatest potential to reduce the pest status of imported fire ant in Texas.

He attributes most of the funding of his phorid fly research to the networking efforts of members of TSCRA following his first talk to the group in June 1994. From 1990-2002 he served as member of the Texas State Board of The Nature Conservancy. In 2004, Larry and colleagues at TAMU, all funded in part through TAES by the State of Texas Fire ant initiative received the first Integrated Pest Management Team Award from The Entomological Society of America and Dow.

Larry is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His Laboratory web site is: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~gilbert/.

Larry has been married to Midland native Christine Mast Gilbert , an artist and poet, for 37 years. They have raised two sons: Jon, currently at Reed College in Portland Oregon, and Owen, a 2002 graduate from Yale University and 3rd year Ph.D. student in evolutionary biology at Rice University.