Nadia Waloff


Nadejda "Nadia" Waloff FRES was a Russian-born English entomologist. She worked on the biology of locusts, flight and dispersal in the Hemiptera, and taught at the Imperial College.
Nadia was born in St. Petersburg and her family fled in 1919 and took refuge in Britain. Along with her sister Zena and two brothers she was taken care of by Boris Uvarov, who was the director of the Anti-Locust Research Centre in London. An early interest in entomology led her and Zena to study at the Imperial College. Nadia worked on pests at the Slough laboratory and received a Ph.D and Sc.D from Imperial College. She was known for her teaching ability and conducted research on the diapause of flour moths, the ecology and population dynamics of various insects. Some of her significant research included studies on the dispersal and flight of Hemiptera including leafhoppers. She examined the factors contributing to wing polymorphism, the presence of wingless, short-winged and long-winged forms in relation to habitats and life-history. She suggested that trees and woody plants are architecturally more complex with leaves being widely separated and making flight more important. This she suggested would explain the observation that cicadas and other arboreal hemiptera rarely had wingless forms. She was also among the first to use radioactive P-35 tracers to study the dispersal of mirid bugs. She retired in 1978.
The grasshopper Oedaleus nadiae was named after her.