Alma mater Cornell University Name John Belkin | Education Cornell University Fields Entomology | |
Institutions University of California Died 1980, United States of America | ||
John N. Belkin (1913–1980) was an American entomologist.
Biography
Belkin was born in 1913 in Petrograd, Russia, and became a citizen of the United States by 1938. The same year, he got a bachelor's degree at Cornell University. Belkin continued to work at Cornell, at first as assistant entomologist for two years, and later as an Entomology Instructor, a position which he kept till 1942. The same year, he got a job as junior entomologist for the Tennessee Valley Authority. But he didn't have a chance to study entomology because he was drafted into the United States Army Sanitary Corps. From 1943 to 1945, he was the Commanding Officer of the 420th Malaria Survey Detachment in the Solomon Islands, where he studied mosquito specimens that he would later use in his volume The Mosquitoes of the South Pacific. After serving in the army, he returned to Cornell in 1946, where he got his PhD in medical entomology. Then he worked at Rutgers University as an assistant specialist for a short period of time, from 1946 to 1949, and was an associate professor for the Associated Colleges of Upper New York. In 1949 he moved to California, where he took a position as assistant professor of entomology at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 1952 he became an associate professor, and a professor of entomology in 1958. Four years later, he became a professor of zoology UCLA, a job that he kept until he died in 1980.