Café Scientifique

Bob Peterson, Montana State University entomology professor and incoming president of the Entomological Society of America, will be the featured speaker at the university’s upcoming Café Scientifique.

Peterson will present “Managing Risk in a Complex World: Reflections on Mosquito-Borne Diseases and the Scientist’s Role in a Post-Fact Media Landscape” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9, at the Baxter Hotel Ballroom in downtown Bozeman. The event is hosted by MSU and co-sponsored by its INBRE and COBRE programs. It is free and open to the public.

During the talk, Peterson will briefly summarize his research on mosquitoes and provide an overview of the tools and techniques currently used to manage mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile, Zika, malaria, yellow fever and dengue. He will also touch on the risks and benefits of common pesticides as well as cutting-edge control possibilities such as gene-editing techniques.

Peterson, who specializes in environmental risk assessment, plans to describe how scientific facts form the basis for risk-evaluation models in his field.