Nadia Waloff


Nadejda "Nadia" Waloff FRES was a Russian-born English entomologist. She worked on the biology of locusts, flight and dispersal of the Hemiptera, and taught at Imperial College, Silwood Park campus.
Nadia was born in St. Petersburg on 2 September 1909. Her family fled in 1919 and took refuge in Britain. After her mother died in 1926 and her father moved to Romania, Sir Boris Uvarov, who was the director of the Anti-Locust Research Centre in London, took in Nadia, her sister Zena and two brothers. An early interest in entomology led her and Zena to study at the Imperial College. After earning her bachelor’s degree, Nadia taught at a school for a number of years.
In 1946, Nadia began her work on pests at the Slough laboratory and received a Ph.D and Sc.D from Imperial College. She was known for her exceptional teaching ability and she also 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 phosphorus, P-35, tracers to study the dispersal of mirid bugs.
Waloff retired in 1978, but in 1990, she was still publishing as a member of the Department of Pure and Applied Biology, at the Imperial College.
The grasshopper Oedaleus nadiae was named after her.

Selected publications

Waloff published under both her given name, Nadejda, and her preferred name, Nadia.