UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2005

Departments

Features

A Fruitful Partnership

A New Kind of Farm a New Breed of Farmer

Dear One Absent This Long While

Feature

Ron Prokopy, 1935-2004
Another Great Day in the Field

–Chris O'Carroll




	Ron Prokopy, 1935-2004

THE LAST DAY OF RON PROKOPY'S life, a Thursday last May, was like a thousand other days in his busy career. Ron spent it on the road in three New England states, visiting orchards, talking to fruit growers, and foraging for new knowledge about insects. He was already one of the world’s most celebrated entomologists but knew there was always more to learn. Back home, Ron spoke on the phone with doctoral student Jaime Piñero, telling him it had been another great day in the field.

Ron was a youthful 68, strong and active physically as well as intellectually. He ran, he swam, he published articles on insect science at a rate that astounded many of his friends and colleagues. He was getting ready to retire from teaching, accepting no more graduate students after Piñero, but planned to stay active in research. When Ron went to bed that night, nobody had any reason to doubt he would wake up the next morning.

Ronald J. Prokopy was a Connecticut native who earned his PhD at Cornell and spent most of his career at UMass Amherst.. In a long, distinguished entomology career, he left perhaps his most enduring legacy in the field of integrated pest management, an insect control system that minimizes chemical spraying. Through painstaking observation of insect behavior, he developed new techniques to monitor pest populations and life cycles, so that growers can spray only when needed. “Ron was an exceptional individual,” says faculty colleague Wes Autio. “He was a real honest, down-to-earth person who had the growers at heart all the time.”

Among the innovations for which Prokopy is remembered are his spherical traps, painted to mimic the look of fruit, which hang in trees to help growers keep tabs on insect populations. One popular Ron story involves an excited colleague introducing the new faculty member early in his UMass Amherst career: “This is Ron Prokopy. You know, the guy with the red and yellow sticky balls.”

One of Ron’s major research efforts at the end of his life involved a “sentinel tree” system that protects an orchard by luring large numbers of insects to just a few trees around the periphery. Working with Piñero and with Piñero’s wife, laboratory technician Isabel Jácome, Ron devised a combination of scents—apple blossoms and insect pheromones—to bait the sentinel tree traps for maximum effectiveness.

“Ron was very intense,” Piñero remembers. “I was very happy with him. I just couldn’t learn enough from him.” When Piñero was an undergraduate in his native Mexico, his mentor was a Mexican scientist with a UMass Amherst doctorate, a former student of Ron’s. For years, Piñero dreamed of someday making his way to Amherst to work in the laboratory of his teacher’s teacher. “I knew that I was going to be Ron’s last PhD student,” he says, “but I never thought I would be the last in these circumstances.”

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A Fruitful Partnership

A Fruitful Partnership: more images

Ron Prokopy, 1935-2004

Ron Prokopy, 1935-2004: larger image