Old News

17 December 2018

Just returned from an excellent trip to Puerto Rico to meet with our collaborators on the CBB project. Dr. Jose Carlos Verle Rodrigues of the UPR. We were able to tour a farm and complete significant work with the team there. Thank you to all who hosted us, esp JCVR!

03 September 2018

Today is labor day, and in honor of past labors (and because I received an inquiry), here is a link enabling those interested to reach Formatomatic. Its >for this project, and the site on taylor0 is no longer available. I hope it lives on (usefully) for a while longer on Sourceforge, which has been a very reliable partner for me.

04 August 2018

Today I am going to Waimea to attend the funeral of my good friend and colleague Roger Vargas who passed away as the result o> Roger was many things, including an excellent scientist, generous mentor and collaborator, a resilliant human being, an>

21 March 2018

Our paper on the effect of larval host fruit on emerging adult response to lures has been accepted by JEE. We found that when oriental fruit fly larvae are raised in Terminalia fruit, the resulting adults seem to have a lowered response to methyl eugenol, the most important lure for detection and control of this species. We also had a video-article on our CBB monitoring method published this week.

22 January 2018

My second partial US Government shutdown as a Federal Employee. This time only results in 5 hours of furlough, but still no fun.

20 December 2017

My recent paper with Travis Collier on evaluation of quarantine lengths was featured as a highlight in the FAO/IAEA Insect Pest Control Newsletter Number 90) on pg 36.

12 December 2017

I've created a publons account to track my peer reviews. My profile is is here. This is an interesting effort, though many researchers might hesitate due to confidentiality issues. I have been signing my reviews over the last few years, so for me this is not an issue.

17 October 2017

Three papers published in quick succession this month, two from work started in 2014 (Jang et al and Gaertner et al) and another in 2016 (Khan et al). Great to have these complete.

21 September 2017

This has been a very busy year for travel: Brazil, Austria, New Zealand, Taiwan, Kauai, and finally Denver CO. Most sponsored, but still a lot of time on the road.

28 June 2017

Welcoming a few new people in our lab for the summer. One is Briana McCarthy, a professor at Los Medanos CC in N. California. She is joining us through the USDA Hispanic-Serving Institutions National Program's Kika de la Garza Fellowship Program, and will be focused on CBB with Melissa Johnson. The other are Jana and Alyssa, HS students at St. Joseph HS in Hilo. Welcome to all three!

24 May 2017

I am presenting some of our recent ABS results at Third FAO–IAEA International Conference on Area-wide Management of Insect Pests. In a couple of weeks I will be in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, at the 15th SICONBIOL, to discuss some of the experience with biological control of tephritids in the Pacific.

1 February 2017

Melissa Johnson has started today in my lab! Melissa is a postdoc who will be working on our Coffee Berry Borer (CBB) research. She is an expert in the genus Cyrtandra, and has experience in molecular phylogenetics, speciation in plants and taxonomy. In addition, she has conducted significant field work around the Pacific, in Hawaii, California, Samoa and Fiji. We are delighted to have her help and look forward to a very productive postdoctoral appointment.

10 January 2017

We are happy to welcome Travis Collier to the lab. Travis is a modeler and programer who will be focused on developing computer-generated trap networks for invasive fruit fly detection. We are pleased to have him in our group.

03 November 2016

Josep Bau i Ma cià and Ring Card é just completed some time in Hilo working with me on some experiments focused on wind and trap catches. There is a press release from the University of Vic in Catalonia, Spain (Where Dr. Macià works) about thi s research.

14 September 2016

I have just been selected as the new Research Leader for the TCCPRU at DKI-PBARC. I am excited to start on this new challenge.

29 August 2016

Two new openings in my lab, both for postdocs. One is to work on computer- designed optimized trapping networks, and the other to coordinate CBB research as part of the Area-Wide project. Follow links for announcements, and email with any questions.

3 April 2016

With Roger Vargas I am co-organizing a symposium at the Pacif ic Branch meeting of the ESA in Honolulu starting today. Symposium is titled "Current Research on Fruit Flies (Diptera: Tephritidae) in the Pacific Area".

10 February 2016

Two new papers in press, both related to attractants and trapping, and also tied together by computer vision methods: one on Medfly behavior on a trap in PLoS ONE and another on a new attractant for Queensland fruit fly in J. of Chemical Ecology.

28 September 2015

My lab was just awarded an ARS Administrator's Research Associate, class of 2016. I will be looking for an outstanding postdoc with a background in computational biology to work on some exciting new projects for two years. I am very pleased to have this support- stay tuned for the announcement.

01 July 2015

New release of MED-FOES (ver 0.6)! This version includes spatial modeling of an eradication trapping grid via TrapGrid, which is a significant increase in eradication realism. Execution time is longer if this feature is used, but in many cases it will be worth it. In associated news, a couple of papers on trap attraction are now available (here and here).

02 June 2015

A Farm Bill section 10007 suggestion with cooperators at APHIS, NC State and UF has been awareded $170K to model Medfly risk in the continental US. This model will include the entire invasion process, including cost of eradication. This last factor will be modeled using MED-FOES.

22 April 2015

I'm organizing a workshop in Hilo and Kona to further a spatial model of coffee berry borer (CBB) in Hawaii. The expert group at the workshop will include researchers from ARS, NASA and Cornell Univerity. We will be meeting with other CBB researchers from University of Hawaii and also with coffee growers from April 27-May 1.

17 October 2014

A paper describing a new computer model of insect traps in a landscape has been accepted in the journal Scientific Reports. You can read it here. This is the second paper (the first was on mosquito swarms with my UMD colleagues) I have published in SRep, a new NPG journal.

14 September 2014

Moana has received a significant compute upgrade. Read more here. Also, a new paper on mosquito swarms, an analysis of male motion coordination, has reached publication. Read that paper here.

04 April 2014

New version of MED-FOES (0.51) released, with some fixes to annoying bugs, including file system path handling.

28 March 2014

Major updates to moana, the HPC cluster at PBARC. Read more here.

04 November 2013

Updated version of guiLiner has been posted (ver 0.4). This includes a new feature, arbitrary separators for range options. Motivation was a GUI for MED-FOES_p.

02 November 2013

A new, multi-threaded version of MED-FOES, called MED-FOES_p (p is for "parallel") is nearly ready for release. Some benchmark results are available on moana.

01 October 2013

Partial US Government shutdown due to lapse in funding begins. All research at PBARC is halted.

18 June 2013

Three new papers in Press: one on spatial dynamics of B. dorsalis and two of its parasitoids with Roger Vargas, one on rearing fruit flies and the paper describing MED-FOES; the last two both from my lab.

10 April 2013

A new version of MED-FOES had just been released. This corrects a problem with the calculation of hourly mortality from daily input values and also with how mortality from different sources was being combined. Get the new version (0.42) from the web site

13 March 2013

Our work with computer vision and automatic counting of fruit flies on a screen has been featured in "Fruit fly News". Click here and here to see details.

11 March 2013

Returned to Hawaii from a trip to Juazeiro, Bahia (Brazil), where I was invited to present some results of our stereoscopic mosquito swarm studies to a Research Coordination Meeting (RCM) of the IAEA. I had the opportunity to see from up close the "Projeto Aedes Transgenico", one of the first to release transgenic disease vectors in the world. More on PAT.

31 October 2012

First paper on using computer vision to study the behavior of tephritid flies has been accepted to Annals of the Entomological Society of America. This should be a foundation for further studies using the same basic approach.

10 August 2012

A copule of new publications have been added to the pubs page: one on mosquito swarming with S. Butail, D. Paley, J. Ribeiro et al (J. of the Royal Society Interface) and one a review on biological control of tephritid flies in the Pacific with R. Vargas, L. Leblanc and E. Harris (Insects). A nice bridge between past work and future.

21 March 2012

I have some video showing our use of machine vision for detecting fruit flies on a screen. This is my first time posting a video using the HTML5 video tag, and it was not as simple as I'd hoped- I am not sure this will work on all browsers. Still, you can give it a try if you click here.

10 October 2011

The work resulting from experiments on the direction of movement of An. gambiae upon emergence from the aquatic phase has been accepted for publication in PLoS ONE. Updated pubs and link should be available in a few weeks.

05 July 2011

My first paper produced from my work as an ARS employee has finally been published in JoVE, a peer reviewed video- journal focused on biological protocols. It is available for free: An Optimized Protocol for Rearing Fopius arisanus, a Parasitoid of Tephritid Fruit Flies.

01 March 2011

A paper on the sialome of an Amblyoma tick has been accepted and is now available at BMC Genomics. I was happy to be able to contribute to this work.

11 November 2010

Unitsci is finally installed in its new home in Hilo. Many updates pending.

13 September 2010

This was my first day at USDA as a research biologist in Hilo, Hawaii. In my new position I should be focusing on Tephritid fruit fly ecology and behavior.

14 August 2010

Tomorrow I depart for Mali to collect more swarm video data. Chances are good that this trip will yield an excellent dataset- we are in a better position than ever before to unravels some intricate details of the mating of An. gambiae.

10 August 2010

I have accepted an offer of employment from the USDA. More news to follow soon!

27 April 2010

The MRR paper is freely available from PLoS ONE at this link.

30 March 2010

Our manuscript describing the results of our Mark-Release-Recapture study in the Bancoumana area in 2008 has been accepted for publication at PLoS ONE. This paper is another part of our efforts to characterize population dynamics of An. gambiae in and near the riparian areas of the Niger River near Bancoumana.

09 September 2009

A new paper describing assortative swarming between the M and S molecular forms has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

04 December 2008

A technical paper giving details on the stereoscopic mosquito localization method used in the JME "swarms" paper is available on Nature Preceedings. Click here to read all about it.

18 November 2008

"Structure and Dynamics of Male Swarms of Anopheles gambiae" is in press at the J. Medical Entomology. This is the first work using stereoscopic imaging to localize mosquitoes in space; code to do this and more details will shortly available here. I'll also update the bibliography once the paper is published.

02 June 2008

A paper describing guiLiner, a project developed with Eric Anderson, is now available on ArXiv. Link is in the Publications page.

31 January 2008

The simulation work on ecotypification is in press at PNAS. It has been combined with some empirical field data generated by some most excellent colleages. I am very pleased with the outcome. The pubs page will be updated once the paper has been published.

14 November 2007

First release of guiLiner (see http://guiliner.sourceforge.net/) in collaboration with Eric Anderson. We hope that this program will save many hours of time to biologists who write computer applications and that it makes many programs more available to researchers who are end users.

01 November 2007

Added details on some current projects to the "research" page.

23 July 2007

Unitsci is open for business, with an embryonic interface. Look around, see if you find something useful. I welcome comments and suggestions.