Year of Honorary Fellowship, 2010
Peter Cranston joined the RES in the late 1970s when he worked across the road in Queensgate in the British Museum (Natural History). He presented a seminar on his PhD studies of the immature stages of UK chironomid midges, and a little later on his involvement in allergy-inducing midges in the Sudan. Although relocating to Canada, then Australia, interrupted by a decade 2000-2010 at UC Davis, California, he retained involvement in RES largely as a board member and editor for the journal Systematic Entomology. It was a time of growth of the journal in scientific content (citations) and in liaising with Wiley and editors of the other journals.
He has written many pieces for Antenna as a roving ‘overseas reporter’, but may be best known for the 5 editions written with Penny Gullan of ‘The Insects: an Outline of Entomology’ which has become the go-to textbook. Throughout he continued to study the systematics and ecology of ‘his midges’, especially southern hemisphere biogeographic relationships using molecular data. Although retired for the past decade, he advises the editors of Systematic Entomology and writes papers from the backlog of 25+ years of linking molecular data with midge morphology.
