Smirnoff, Wladimir A, 1917-2000 : Dr. Wladimir A. Smirnoff was an insect pathologist and forestry researcher. He was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia in 1917. He studied forest engineering at the USSR Forestry Insitute and did doctoral studies in entomology at the Forest Academy in Saint Petersburg, USSR.
After the Second World War, Smirnoff fled the Soviet Union with his wife and their first daughter. From 1947 to 1957, he worked for the Morocco Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA) as a research scientist, developing control methods against scale insects on palm and citrus trees. While at the INRA, Smirnoff completed his doctoral degree in science at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1957, Smirnoff and his family immigrated to Canada where he worked for the Laurentian Forest Research Centre in Ste.-Foy, Quebec as head of the Canadian Forest Service's Insect Pathology Division. During this time, he was also an adjunct professor at the Research Centre in Forest Biology at Laval University where he supervised doctoral studies and taught courses for post-graduate students. Smirnoff was also a renowned nature artist and his paintings have been exhibited across Canada and the world.
As a research scientist Smirnoff developed new approaches for fighting insect pests. He studied viral and bacterial diseases in insects, discovering more than twenty new viruses. He studied the effects of chemical and biological insecticides and pesticides on the environment, developing operational uses for insect diseases to control the population of harmful insects to Canadian forests. Smirnoff's main preoccupation was the spruce budworm. In 1974, he developed the biological insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.) which is widely used around the world.
Smirnoff published over 300 scientific papers throughout his lifetime and received a number of honours and awards, amongst which the most prestigious are the Maurice Thérèse Pic Award which he received from the French Government for his work in Africa and the Prix Léo-Pariseau from the Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences (ACFAS) in 1984. In 1988 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and he received the Order of Canada in 1997. In 2001, the Société de protection des forêts contre les insectes et maladies (SOPFIM) and Natural Resources Canada-Canadian Forestry Service (NRC-CFS) created the Wladimir Smirnoff Fellowship given every year to two graduate students studying biological forest pest control at a Quebec University.
W.A. Smirnoff and his wife, Alexandra, had three daughters, Natalie, Olga and Tania. He died in Ste.-Foy, Quebec on November 1, 2000 at the age of 83.
