Editor's Roundup
USDA people in the news

      Ed King was selected as the director of the Agricultural Research Service’s five-state Mid South Area, headquartered in Stoneville, Miss. He succeeded Tom Army, who served in that position from July 1995 until he retired in February 2001, following 32 years of service with ARS.

      From January 1998 until he was selected for this position, effective in February 2001, King served as the associate director of the Mid South Area. He was the director of the agency’s Kika de la Garza Subtropical Agricultural Research Center in Weslaco, Texas from 1988-98. Within that period, during the last three months of 1997 he led in conceiving and drafting ARS’s new national research program on the Formosan subterranean termite. That research program is based in the Mid South Area’s Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans.

      King served as director of ARS’s Southern Field Crop Insect Management Laboratory in Stoneville from 1981-88. He also worked as a research leader of the Biology, Ecology, and Biocontrol of Insects Research Unit at that lab, studying pest management and biological control, from 1976-88. He began his career with ARS at that lab in 1972 as a research entomologist studying biological control and insect rearing, with an emphasis on the sugarcane borer in sugarcane in south Louisiana and south Florida. From 1971-72 he was based in Marion, Ark., as a research biologist in pesticide research and development with the Niagara Chemical Division of FMC, an international chemical company. From 1969-71 he was a staff research associate on household and structural pests in the Louisiana State University Entomology Department.

      A native of Dry Creek, La., where he grew up on a dairy farm, King holds a B.S. degree in biology and chemistry from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La., as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in entomology and botany, both from LSU.