Professor Emeritus John B Whittaker has been a member of the Lancaster University community since 1966.
John’s early research into the interactions between insect herbivores and non-crop plants was exceptional at a time when most ecological research into herbivory dealt with large vertebrate herbivores and that into insect herbivores was usually in the context of controlling crop pests. His insightful identification of future research challenges remained evident throughout his career; for example, his pioneering work on below-ground herbivory and the application of molecular techniques to the ecology of plant-herbivore interactions. Research at Silverdale that showed wood ants protected trees from insect herbivores attracted global attention, including the accolade of a cartoon on the back pages of the New Scientist. From the mid-1980s his collaboration with Professor Terry Mansfield and other colleagues pioneered research into multiple aspects of the effects of environmental change on plant-herbivore interactions, including air pollution, increased UV-B radiation, elevated carbon dioxide and climate change.
For his first and doctoral degrees, John was a student at Hatfield College, Durham University, and came to Lancaster in September 1966 as lecturer in Biological Sciences. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1974, and the following year went for six months to the University of Calgary, where he retained links for some time.
On his return to Lancaster, he and the late Andrew Malloch set up and ran the single major programme in Ecology, one of the first of its kind internationally, and drawing on the advantage of having both biological and environmental sciences as foundation subjects at Lancaster. John was Director of Ecology from 1979 onwards, and awarded a personal chair in ecology from 1 January 1987, giving an inaugural lecture the following year entitled “Ecology: scientific natural history”. He was head of department from 1983 to 1986 and, when the Institute of Environmental and Biological Sciences was formed in 1988, became director of its biological sciences division from 1991 to 1994. He took early retirement in 1996, but continued as a part-time research professor until 2004.
He was an active member of the Royal Entomological Society and the British Ecological Society, becoming president of the latter in 2000-01.
