Peter Follett ARS Pacific West Area Senior Scientist of the Year 2022

Peter Follett of the Tropical Crop and Commodity Protection Research Unit, USDA Pacific West Area Agriculture Research Service in Hilo, Hawaii, received the Area Senior Scientist of the Year Award for 2022.
This Award is for his contributions to postharvest entomology and quarantine treatments development.

Well-known to the PI community, Peter has been a promoter of generic irradiation doses for phytosanitary irradiation treatments. A generic treatment is a single dose that controls a group of pests on a variety of commodities. Most quarantine treatments are developed for one pest and one commodity at a time, and research may take several years. Generic treatments accelerate the research, shorten treatment development, and save resources. In 2003, with Guy Hallman, Peter recommended a phytosanitary dose of 150 Gy for all tephritid fruit flies and 400 Gy for all insects (except pupae and adults of Lepidoptera) based on a critical examination of the literature and crucial work that they had done. On January 27, 2006, USDA APHIS published a landmark rule accepting the two generic doses. ISPM has now also accepted treatments at generic doses (see Annexes to ISPM 28).

An Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Entomology since 2002, Peter is also a proponent of accelerators that would bring phytosanitary treatments to packing houses.