Clement Vinauger has been named assistant professor of biochemistry in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

He is one of a number of new faculty members recently hired in the college this academic year. New positions were identified to bring talent to the college's focus areas, including food, health, the environment, and community viability. The new faculty members are distributed across teaching, research, and Extension.

The central theme of Vinauger's research is to seek to understand how disease vector insects interact with their environment. In particular, his work is centered on the factors that modulate vector-host interactions. Among other things, he is focusing on how vectors' ability to learn to recognize and remember the best hosts (e.g. least defensive and easiest to feed on) could help them to reduce the uncertainty associated with their risky feeding habits. In this context, and relying on a collaborative and integrative approach, Vinauger's research combines field and laboratory work, quantitative analysis of behavior, electrophysiology, and molecular biology.

Vinauger received his bachelor's degree in biology from the Université d'Orléans and both his master's degree in biology and his doctorate in biology from the Université François Rabelais.

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