Charles W. Woodworth

Charles William Woodworth (April 28, 1865 – November 19, 1940) was an American entomologist. He published extensively in entomology and founded the Entomology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first person to breed the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) in captivity and to suggest to early genetic researchers at Harvard its use for scientific research. He spent four years at the University of Nanking, China, where he effected the practical control of the city's mosquitoes. He drafted and lobbied for California's first insecticide law and administered the law for 12 years. The Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America named its annual career achievement award the C. W. Woodworth Award.

He was born in Champaign, Illinois on April 28, 1865 to Alvin Oakley Woodworth and Mary Celina (Carpenter) Woodworth. His father was a merchant but died when Charles was four. Some years later, his mother married Alvin's older brother Stephen Elias Woodworth to help raise Charles and his older brother Howard. Stephen had earlier been a resident of Seneca Falls, New York and was a signatory of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

Charles graduated with a BS in 1885 and an MS in 1886 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The funds received from the judgment in the 1884 U.S. Supreme Court Case, New England Mutual Life Ins. Co. v. Woodworth, may have helped pay for his education. During the period of 1884–1886, he was assistant to S.A. Forbes. From 1886 to 1888 he studied at Harvard University under Hermann August Hagen, who, at the time, was the leading entomologist of the U.S. He returned between 1900 and 1901 and worked under William E. Castle. In 1888, he was appointed entomologist and botanist at the University of Arkansas's Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station. On September 4, 1889, he married Leonora Stern in Rolla, Missouri, the city where her parents, Edward Stern and Lizzie Hardin Evans Stern, lived. Charles suffered from successive attacks of malaria while in Arkansas. He left there in 1891 to become assistant in entomology at the University of California (now UC Berkeley) where he founded and built up the Division of Entomology. He also participated in the development of the Agricultural Experiment Station, now known as UC Davis, and is also considered the founder of the Entomology Department there.

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