Tributes are pouring in for renowned chemical ecologist Jeffrey Richard Aldrich (1949-2025), a longtime researcher at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, USDA Agricultural Research Service, who retired in 2011 and then worked with UC Davis researchers for a decade.
Aldrich was considered one of the best chemical ecologists in the world.
He joined the Beltsville team in 1980, and concentrated on semiochemistry and behavior of true bugs, lacewings, and related groups including their natural enemies. After he retired from his USDA-ARS career, he moved to California and served 10 years as an associate researcher in the Agricultural Experiment Station, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. He worked with the Frank Zalom lab, which specializes in integrated pest management.
Here's what UC Davis Distinguished Professor Frank Zalom, an Honorary Member, Fellow and past president of the Entomological Society of America said in a tribute posted today on our UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology website:
“Jeff was a well-respected chemical ecologist with a unique and outgoing personality,” said Zalom, an Honorary Member, Fellow and past president of the Entomological Society of America. “I worked with him on stink bug attractants for many years while he worked for the USDA-ARS in Beltsville, and he included me on a patent for consperse stink bug, Euschistus conspersus. One of my PhD students, Eileen Cullen, did her thesis and dissertation research on this insect. Jeff and I became much closer after he retired, moved to California, and formally became an associate in the Agricultural Experiment Station in our department and associated with my lab.
“Jeff was a never-ending source of research ideas. He was an advisor for several of our graduate students and a became great mentor to two international scholars who were in my lab. One, Roberta Tognon from Brazil, studied the chemical ecology of brown marmorated stink bug parasitoids. The other, Elda Vitanovic a Fulbright Scholar from Croatia, worked on yeast volatiles aa olive fruit fly attractants. Jeff co-authored papers that resulted from their research. The yeast work also generated data for a lacewing paper that Jeff was very excited about, but he left California before we could pursue additional studies. Interestingly, Elda has continued to pursue yeast volatiles research, and recently received a grant from the Croatia National Science Foundation for additional studies. Jeff and I remained in close contact after he moved to Minnesota to be with his aging mother. There he built a small research facility at her home where he raised a predatory stink bug, Podisus."
UC Davis Distinguished Professor Walter Leal of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, first met Aldrich in Japan where he worked before coming to the United States.
Here's what Leal said in his tribute:
“Jeff was an influential and innovative chemical ecologist whose warmth, scientific integrity, and mentorship left a lasting mark on his colleagues, students, and the broader entomology and chemical ecology communities. We instantly connected when we first met at an entomology congress in Brazil. He had traveled from the United States, and I had come from Japan. My conversational English was limited at the time, but I genuinely enjoyed talking with Jeff. As I told him then, “You’re like CNN Headlines—you repeat the same story so many times that I eventually understand it.”
“Over the next three decades, our friendship deepened through humor,” Leal noted. “We shared so many jokes that we developed an inside joke (originally from Jeff’s father): we didn’t need to retell them anymore, just say the number, and we’d both laugh. Jeff also spent a few months as a visiting scholar in my laboratory in Japan. His insect dissection skills were unmatched, and he generously offered to teach others. I gained as much from watching him help others as I did from his direct collaboration, especially during our work isolating stink bug pheromones.”
“Beyond the lab, Jeff’s leadership in the field was just as impactful,” Leal said. “He hosted an annual chemical ecology meeting in Washington, DC, served as president of the International Society of Chemical Ecology (ISCE), and was an associate editor of the Journal of Chemical Ecology. ISCE meetings were better with Jeff. The world was better with Jeff in it.”
(Note: the header photo on this blog is of Aldrich working in Japan in the Leal lab. Leal captured the image)
Born in Columbus, Ohio
Born July 14, 1949 in Columbus, Ohio, Aldrich died June 28, 2025 in Fort Myers, Fla. “He died the morning of June 28,” said his daughter Ellison Aldrich, a large-animal veterinarian in Columbus, N.C. “He had had a brain bleed suddenly on Wednesday, June 25, and was rushed to critical care in Fort Myers, where he lived but unfortunately the damage was too extensive. He is survived by me, his only child, his mother and his two older sisters.”
Her tribute to him on this page is so powerful.
“He never let his pride or any sense of self consciousness get in the way of a good story,” Ellison said. “He was so unique in many ways... the most unpretentious, unconcerned with where someone came from, so willing to immerse himself in other cultures or groups. He was one of few people I can think of that genuinely did not care what people thought. Some of my fondest memories with my dad were accompanying him at USDA on the weekends doing fieldwork, which he continued to enjoy throughout his career."
"In fact, I actually learned to drive there (at a tender age I will not disclose), going down the USDA dirt roads and stopping at every bug trap for him to check," she related. "Some of my most embarrassing memories of him are also entomology related. He would often show up to my sports games in full field collecting get up, which for him consisted of ratty cargo pants with pants tucked into socks (tick prevention), L.L. Bean boots, fanny pack, collapsible bug net and trucker hat. The man was brilliant but never a paragon of fashion. If ever my sports games or practices ran late, he'd get bored and start collecting bugs in the bushes, much to my adolescent dismay. Up until 2019 he was rearing bugs at home, I think mostly for the fun of it, but also shipping eggs to collaborators around the world for projects. I don't think I have ever met anyone who loved what they do in quite the same way he did.”
Read the other tributes here.
We wish we could have met Jeffrey Richard Aldrich. What an incredible scientist and caring human being--and with a terrific sense of humor!
Watch video tribute to Jeff Aldrich by his close friend and colleague UC Davis Distinguished Professor Walter Leal.