For Gary Mullen, it all started in fourth grade.

A buddy who came to spend the summer with the Mullens at their home in Ogdensburg, N.Y. was big on bug-collecting. So fervent was his zeal for this newly found hobby that Mullen couldn’t help himself: He got hooked.

“I loved the outdoors, and I was intrigued by the insect world,” says Mullen, AAES researcher and AU professor of Entomology. “I’d collect insects and learn anything I could about them.”

Despite Mullen’s keen interest in insects, it wasn’t until he entered graduate school at Cornell University in 1968 that he took his first entomology course. He had received his undergraduate degree in biological science from Northeastern University in Boston and had been encouraged to pursue medical school and an M.D. degree.

“But all through the years, I had never lost my interest in insects, and when I thought seriously about it, insects were more appealing to me than medicine,” Mullen says. “I decided to combine entomology and medicine. That put me in medical entomology, which is the study of any insects that pose human health problems.”

He earned his master’s degree in entomology from Cornell in 1970 and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1974. His major was insect ecology, or the interrelationship between insects and their environments.

As a graduate teaching assistant at Cornell, Mullen discovered a love of teaching and interacting with students. Subsequently, his career goal was to get in a university setting.

In 1974, however, university positions in his field were hard to come by. So, he accepted a job as medical entomologist with the Allegheny County Health Department in Pennsylvania. His major assignment: preventing St. Louis encephalitis, a mosquito-borne disease, from spreading into the Pittsburgh and Allegheny County area.

Mullen established a highly effective program that continues to operate successfully there today.

“We significantly reduced the amount of pesticides used in the Pittsburgh area by monitoring mosquito populations and carefully selecting the chemicals we used as sprays,” said Mullen.

As successful as he was with the vector control program in Pittsburgh, however, Mullen still yearned for a university position. That opportunity presented itself in the summer of 1975 when a job opened at Auburn University for a medical-veterinary entomologist.

“For me, it was the ideal job, because it would allow me to teach, do research, and work with graduate students,” Mullen says.

Currently, Mullen teaches three graduate-level courses—medical-veterinary entomology; aquatic insects; and arachnology, or the study of spiders and their relatives—as well as the undergraduate course “Insects Affecting Humans, Domestic Animals and Wildlife.”

Mullen’s outstanding abilities in the classroom have netted him a number of teaching awards through the years, including the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence from the College of Agriculture in 1988, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Entomological Society (ESA) of America in 1989, and the Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award from the Auburn Alumni Asso-ciation in 1996-97.

As an AAES researcher, Mullen’s time is divided between continuous, long-term studies and work on immediate public health concerns.

His major on-going areas of research involve biting flies and their role in transmitting disease agents; tiny biting midges and their key role in the transmission of bluetongue disease in cattle and hemorrhagic disease in deer (see “Bluetongue Disease: Possible Cause of High Calving Losses in Alabama” Fall 1999 Highlights and “Hemorrhagic Disease: Cause of Die-off in White-tailed Deer” Winter 1999 Highlights); and ticks as vectors of disease in humans and other animals.

In his long-term tick research projects, Mullen is investigating the occurrence of ticks on humans in Alabama (see “Alabamians Vulnerable Targets for Ticks” in this issue of Highlights), the phenomenon of tick paralysis in wild birds (see “Tick Paralysis in Wild Birds: A Cyclic Phenomenon?” Winter 1999 Highlights), and Lyme disease.

“The lead public health issue of the day is where you put your major research efforts in this field, because that’s where the support and money are,” Mullen says.

Presently, the focus is on West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease that causes a potentially fatal form of encephalitis in humans. As part of a multi-state surveillance network established to detect and prevent further spread of the virus, Mullen heads the mosquito investigation component in central Alabama.

Respect for Mullen’s expertise in entomology extends statewide and nationally. For instance, he has been the medical entomology consultant to the Alabama Poison Control Center since 1980 and is on the ESA’s Governing Board, representing Medical-Veterinary Entomology.

Mullen’s wife, Jackie, is a plant pathologist who heads the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s Plant Diagnostic Laboratory and is a member of the Plant Pathology faculty. The Mullens have two children. Alan is working in the M.D.-Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania; Diane is completing her master’s degree in physical therapy at Washington University in St. Louis.

When asked about his interests outside of work, Mullen makes no bones about it: He digs archeology.

“That’s my major hobby,” says Mullen, who is president of the East Alabama Chapter of the Alabama Archeological Society and president-elect of the state organization.

It makes one wonder: If that pal in fourth grade had been into collecting arrowheads instead of insects...