Bio

Nicholas S. McDonald

B.Sc. Horticulture, Oregon State University, 2024

Concentration: Ecological Management of Turf, Landscape, and Urban Horticulture

M.Sc. Horticulture, Oregon State University (in-progress)

Entomology Program

Extended Bio

      My name is Nicholas S. McDonald, I live in Corvallis, Oregon on the West Coast of the United States of America. I was born in Flushing, Queens, New York City in the 1990s, and grew up in Middle Village, Queens. I later moved to Middletown, New Jersey in the 2000s, where I spent my teenage years. My mother is from Washington Heights, Manhattan, and my father is from Billingham, County Durham, in the North Yorkshire region of England. They met in Aruba, and I have one older brother, who was born when they lived in Scotland. I also have an older half-brother through my father who still lives in England, and he has two children now. COVID has gotten in the way of me traveling to England to visit family, but hopefully I'll be able to go more often once I stop being so busy with school/work, now that the pandemic is over.

*Rego Park, Queens – a neighborhood I once lived in.*

      Prior to college, I attended the Marine Academy of Science & Technology (MAST) on Sandy Hook in Monmouth County, New Jersey. MAST is a public magnet high school with an emphasis on marine biology. An adjacent NOAA lab supported a working relationship between the school and research bodies. MAST also has its own large research vessel which further provided opportunities for students to conduct real-world marine biology experiments. MAST is located in the Gateway National Recreation Area, a federally protected area spanning multiple states in the NYC region in order to protect bayshore and oceanfront ecosystems. MAST also heavily emphasizes NJROTC, which the entire student body is enrolled in. I was very involved with the academic team, competing in tournaments throughout the state, and to this day, I'm a pretty good trivia player. During high school, I helped establish the Sandy Hook Herbarium during my senior year, which led to my eventual interest in pursuing horticulture academically.

Sandy Hook Lighthouse, the oldest working lighthouse in the USA (c. 1764), adjacent to the MAST campus.

        After graduating high school, I spent my first year of undergraduate studies at Fordham University, pursuing a B.A. in Philosophy. I attended the Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, lived on the Upper West Side, made some friends, and had a typical freshman year experience. I later lived with my father in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after he moved there following the destruction of his house in Union Beach, NJ during Hurricane Sandy. After my first year, I decided to transfer to Oregon State University for my second year in order to study Viticulture & Enology. I tried my best, but health problems forced me to take a break from my studies, and I moved back to New Jersey for a time. I worked in the service industry as the pandemic started, and through the pandemic. After receiving proper treatment for Addison's Disease, my health issues improved, luckily for me. My other life circumstances also changed to allow me to return to OSU, where I graduated with a B.Sc. in Horticulture in June 2024. Upon graduation, I started working towards attaining a Master's degree at OSU in the Horticulture Department, focusing on entomology. I've been a research assistant at the USDA-ARS in a foliar entomology laboratory for the past year, and I'm continuing my research in this lab as part of my graduate studies. My projects involve parasitoid wasps, along with insect pests such as spotted-wing drosophila (SWD).

Memorial Union Quad, Oregon State University

      My academic interests are generally related to research as a pursuit in itself, and entomology is the field that I've found myself in, which has been an interesting journey. Much of my research activity has been in the realm of biological control of insect pests, focusing on various parasitoid wasp species. I have a few scientists in my family, 7 of my cousins that I know about were elected Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS), and a first cousin of mine was also knighted for his work in geology, Sir George Malcolm Brown. My most famous cousin in science is probably J. B. S. Haldane, sometimes known in entomology for his quote on the divine maker having "an inordinate fondness for beetles." Many of his nephews became famous scientists in their own right.

      Just as a fun genealogical excursion and ignoring the consequences of pedigree collapse making this rabbit hole largely meaningless, my 11th great uncle is the seminal Irish historian Geoffrey Keating, the author of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. Through the Keatings, I can trace my genealogy back a few thousand years through the Welsh royal House of Gwynedd, and also to the Florentine noble House of Gherardini (most famous today, perhaps, as the family of Lisa Gherardini, the subject of the Mona Lisa). The Gherardini claim a gens Julia ancestry through Cottius. In turn, this line is mythologically traced back to Zeus through Tros and Aeneas. Supposedly, Ganymede is one of my distant cousins, hah! I'm also a McDonald, and probably among the hundreds of thousands of descendants of Somerled in Clan Donald. Aside from being Irish, English, and Scottish, I'm also Italian, Greek, Cypriot, Turkish, and Persian. I have an interest in history and geography, so this sort of pursuit is interesting to me.

      My other hobbies include thrifting and collecting, my favorite items being souvenirs people obtained on their travels and later donated. My apartment is a sort of collection of random ephemera, local artifacts, and whatever interests me on my trips to Goodwill or St. Vinnie's. I'm also interested in travel, I've been to 45/50 US states so far, 8/10 Canadian provinces, and 16 countries. My favorite places that I've been to are Utah, Iceland, Japan, and Aruba. My bucket list goal would probably be visiting every continent, including Antarctica. A more realistic goal for me is to visit the Faroe Islands, Finland, and Greenland. I want to see more Arctic/near-Arctic places. I also tend to enjoy convoluted wikipedia adventures, and I read a great deal— some may call my affliction bibliophilia, or perhaps it is bibliomania. I think I own well over 5,000 books at this point, and with the help of Library Genesis, my e-book collection is also absurd and well-beyond that figure, somehow. Digital hoarding is real.

Nicholas McDonald

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