May R. Berenbaum (USA) was born in 1953. Swanlund Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She graduated with a B.S. and honors in biology from Yale University and received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in ecology and evolutionary biology. Since 1980, she has been on the faculty of the Department of Entomology at UIUC, serving as head of the department since 1992.
Her research addresses insect-plant coevolution at multiple levels, including molecular and biochemical adaptations of insects to toxins and impacts of chemical defense on insect distribution and abundance in natural and managed ecosystems, in the United States and recently in the Netherlands and New Zealand. This work has been published in over 220 journal articles and 30 book chapters.
She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Entomological Society of America, and the American Philosophical Society and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has served as editor of Annual Review of Entomology since 1996 and is on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Journal of Chemical Ecology.
Devoted to fostering scientific literacy, she has authored numerous magazine articles, as well as six books, about insects for the general public. Her book Bugs in the System has been translated into German, Japanese, and Korean.