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Barr Fellowship Fosters Important Work

To Rebekah Kent and Scott Shone, mosquitoes are more than pesky creatures that swarm about on a warm summer evening; they are the vectors of pathogens that cause many harmful diseases, such as malaria, West Nile virus, and equine encephalitis. Following in the path of the late Allan Ralph Barr, ScD '52 (Parasitology), both Kent and Shone are involved in research that takes them into the field to study the organisms in their natural habitat.

Kent, a first-year PhD student in the School’s W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI), worked in operational mosquito control projects and West Nile surveillance in Arkansas before joining the School. She recalls many hours of setting traps to capture and study mosquitoes.

Shone, a fourth-year PhD student in MMI, is examining the effects of climate on mosquito populations by comparing meteorological data with numbers of mosquito species in a specific area. The information could be helpful in predicting when disease-carrying mosquitoes would be in greatest numbers. He is also evaluating different means of trapping mosquitoes using mosquito traps of varying heights, with some as high as 20 feet.

To assist students like Kent and Shone, Dr. Ralph Barr’s wife Sylvia endowed a fellowship in 1998 for doctoral or post-doctoral students working in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology who are working with vectors of infectious diseases in their natural habitats. To honor the memory of her late husband, she stipulated that the recipients must have "commitment to the importance of investigating vectors of infectious disease at the level of the organism and its natural habitat."

During his extensive career in public health, Dr. Barr made many significant and original contributions to the field of medical entomology and tropical medicine. He often worked closely with his wife, who was a Hopkins-trained medical illustrator. At the time of his death in 1995, Ralph Barr was professor emeritus in the Department of Epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health and the world’s foremost authority on the genetics of the Culex mosquito. Over the years of research, Barr often used field observations to enhance and or confirm results of laboratory studies.

Some of the work that extended to the field occurred on one of Barr’s most celebrated laboratory demonstrations—that a supposed “cytoplasmic incompatibility” in the common house mosquito was due not to a genetic mechanism, but rather to infection in the insect by a rickettsial organism, Wohlbachia—took place in his own backyard.

Working in the field is something Kent and Shone both enjoy, even when they have to wear protective gear or brave extreme temperatures. At the height of mosquito season, Shone says he catches and analyzes nearly 10,000 mosquitoes a week and as many as 50,000 in a year. The work may seem tedious, but they both agree it can be very satisfying.

"Lab work is important, but it is also important to get out into the field to learn how things are working in the environment,” Kent said.