Background

“I always wanted to go into entomology; it’s been my avocation since I was 6 or 7 years old!” Obviously, Eric Haubruge didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about his career choice. Originally from Gembloux, he has always lived around there, and at an early age he met some professional entomologists. “I started coming up to the Faculty when I was 14,” he recalls. “Here, to visit the very service it is now my honor to direct! I was helped out by Charles Gaspar and Charles Verstraeten, who taught me entomology. I used to come by on Wednesday afternoons. The service was marked by an atmosphere of scientific collaboration that is still in evidence today: we were happy to welcome amateurs and offer access to the library, to make use of our materials, to view the collection, etc.” When Haubruge was only 16, he managed to obtain a subsidy from the Leopold III foundation in order to travel to Africa. This confirmed his choice of a career, and he decided to begin studying agricultural engineering, though always with the eventual goal of becoming an entomologist. When he became a professional, the center of his interests shifted. “At the beginning, I took a systematic view, because that’s what you can’t do when you’re an amateur. I discovered applied entomology while I was in school: in that discipline, you are trying to understand how an insect works, how it lives, and how eventually you can get rid of it. That interested me very much and I stopped concentrating on taxonomy.”

While working on his doctorate, still at Gembloux, he worked in the area of insect physiology. Today he is professor and director of the Functional and Developmental entomology unit of the Faculty of Agronomic Sciences of Gembloux – University of Liège. Eric Haubruge has expanded his research center, and has welcomed an increasing number of doctoral students into his laboratory. Bees are still a mainstay of research, but not the only one: the blue tongue disease (working with the Veterinary Medicine Faculty of ULg), invading ladybugs (the Asiatic kind that appear in large numbers and destroy other ladybugs), and aphids and their interaction with plants are some of the other research foci of the unit…without forgetting criminal entomology, something that is being developed today.