COLLEGE STATION - Brad Hopkins feels like he’s standing in high cotton.
Brad Hopkins, a graduate student at Texas A&M University, is the latest recipient of the C. Everette Salyer Fellowship in cotton research. (Photo provided by the Texas A&M University Department of Entomology)
Not only did the doctoral student recently receive the C. Everette Salyer Fellowship in cotton research at Texas A&M University, he also feels honored to bring in cotton research money to the department of entomology, Hopkins said.
Hopkins said the three-year fellowship will help offset the cost of tuition and books, something that most college students appreciate. More important, it will help pay for his research into pyrethroid insecticide resistance in the cotton bollworm.
Pyrethroids are generally an effective and inexpensive tool used in integrated pest management programs, he said.
Over the past five years, cotton bollworm resistance to pyrethroid insecticides in cotton has increased tremendously and in places has rendered the use of this class of pesticides ineffective, Hopkins said.
His interest in cotton research comes naturally. His father, Sid, owns a company that does consulting and contractual research in cotton, grain sorghum and soybeans in six counties in the Corpus Christi area.
“I grew up following him around cotton fields,” he said.
Hopkins has been working for his father for last 10 years, and acts as a consultant on about 15,000 acres of cotton in that area.
His research will be three-fold, he said.
First, he will raise both resistant and susceptible colonies of bollworms. This will allow him to experiment and find their “resistance mechanisms.”
Second, he will study the genetics of the bollworm to determine their inheritance of resistance.
Third, he will see if characteristics in adult bollworm populations accurately predict whether larvae in the field are resistant to pyrethroids.
He earned a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in entomology from Texas A&M.
The Salyer Fellowship is named after Charles Everette Salyer, a noted cotton producer from the San Joaquin Valley in California. The scholarship was founded at Texas A&M to sponsor either pre-doctoral or post-doctoral fellowships in university departments that do cotton research.
Nine fellowships have been awarded in since 1986, the last one going to a student in the department of entomology in 1999.
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