URI's First Carnegie Professor

Roger LeBrun is a brilliant scientist who knows how to turn his students on to entomology.

URI's First Carnegie Professor

By Chris PoonPhotos By Nora Lewis

Folks in the Registrar’s Office must have goofed. Or maybe they didn’t know just how unappetizing entomology professor Roger LeBrun’s “Humans, Insects and Disease” class could be. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have scheduled the class just after lunch.

LeBrun flashes a photograph of a mosquito sucking blood from someone’s arm; on the giant video screen the insect looks about three feet long. Then, there’s a picture of human skin excreting the squishy larvae of a human bot fly. Certainly the images are no aid to digestion. They are, however, a sign of LeBrun’s excellence as a teacher.

LeBrun won the prestigious 2001 Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year award last fall, having been chosen from a field of nearly 400 faculty members from colleges and universities across the country. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), which established the award, named LeBrun one of 46 state-level winners.

The award spotlights professors who excel at engaging undergraduates and promoting scholarly learning. They must also have made significant professional impact on their universities, communities, and profession.

LeBrun’s résumé outlines those achievements: he has five other teaching awards (he was URI’s 2000 Teacher of the Year), he holds three patents, he has published numerous articles in scientific journals, and he is currently researching the West Nile Virus. He has also been featured on T.V.’s Discovery Channel.

An inflated plastic palm tree stands in Woodward Hall just outside of LeBrun’s office door, which, more often than not, is open to passers-by. For someone who’s made the study of deadly diseases his life’s work, LeBrun’s humor is disarming.

“He is a whirlwind of enthusiasm, exhorting and urging our complete participation—and he succeeds,” wrote Marion Gold, a research associate in natural resources science who is currently completing her Ph.D in applied entomology.

“He carefully crafts his lectures so that each one transmits volumes of information in a cogent and accessible fashion. This skill is coupled with an enthusiasm and enjoyment of his subject that is infectious,” Gold wrote in her letter nominating LeBrun for the Carnegie Foundation award. “After taking Dr. LeBrun’s class, one never looks at an insect from quite the same perspective.”

Of course, this is his intent. “There are more species of insects than all other living things combined. Every niche of this world is influenced by insects,” says LeBrun. The vast majority are either beneficial or benign, which is not exactly consistent with their creepy-crawly, horror flick reputation.

So when people talk about “getting back to nature,” LeBrun makes sure they’re ready to remember that insects are a big part of nature. “I want to instill in students the knowledge that we are living with nature and are part of it, instead of looking at it as the enemy.”

There are, however, a few insects that carry diseases to humans and other animals, and these organisms garner plenty of research attention, LeBrun says.

Unfortunately, poverty and politics have allowed some so-called vector-borne diseases to flourish, he adds. LeBrun’s first-hand view of malaria came as a combat medic in Vietnam, where his work earned him the Bronze Star. There, he witnessed how the disease, spread by mosquitoes, killed children he tried to treat.

“My epiphany came when I served as a medic in Vietnam. The suffering during a war, now 30 years passed, forced me to understand that a life of compassion as a member of a global community was the lesson I had to learn to teach, should I survive,” LeBrun wrote in his personal statement included in his Carnegie award application.

“The Buddhist orphans of Vietnam were my first real students, and I was theirs as we joined in a fundamental struggle for survival. This touchstone became my legacy from the war.”

The malaria crisis has only worsened since. Today, 3,000 to 4,000 African children under age five die daily of the disease.

After the war, LeBrun, a Providence College graduate, went to Cornell to earn his M.S. in Medical Entomology and a Ph.D. in Insect Pathology. “I’m trying to send off proxies of students to do the work I no longer do,” he said. “I have this need to keep sending students to third-world countries.”

Few of his “Humans, Insects and Disease” students go on to become entomologists, but most of them would say that LeBrun’s missionary zeal and masterful teaching style leave a lasting impression.

Richard Casagrande, now the chairman of the Department of Plant Sciences, served on the interview committee when LeBrun first showed up on the Kingston Campus. “He has a really engaging personality, and that was obvious as soon as I met him,” Casagrande said. “It’s still obvious. That’s what makes him so successful.”

Yolanda Bogacz was an 18-year-old college freshman when she wandered into LeBrun’s “Humans, Insects and Disease” class. It was her first lecture hall experience with 100 other students, and she wasn’t expecting to be dazzled.

“He brought cockroaches into class and passed them around. They’d crawl all over your hands and when you patted them, they hissed,” said Bogacz, a double major in computer science and biology who graduated in May. “Most people just expect teachers to recite information from a book or journal articles. But he goes out of his way to make the topic interesting,” she says.

Bogacz was so enthralled with LeBrun’s introductory bug class that she elected to take a second, “Introduction to Entomology,” her sophomore year. Since then, her interests have turned towards other branches of science, but her fondness for LeBrun’s teaching has never dimmed.

“He’s got hundreds of students, but he makes an office appointment and sits down and chats with every single one of his students,” she said. “Once you talk to him, you feel as though you can do anything.”

Chris Poon, a former Providence Journal reporter and a graduate student in education, is currently a student teacher at Stony Lane School in North Kingstown. She lives in Wakefield with her husband and two daughters.

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