(03/19/26) BATON ROUGE, La. — Later this year, Michael Roe, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, will be inducted into the National Academy of Inventors. His insect biology research has led to 16 U.S. patents, four foreign patents and multiple new companies.

Roe traces his interest in insects and his confidence to think big back to his days as a 4-H’er in Iberville Parish.

“My mother was the secretary for the Cooperative Extension Service in Iberville Parish, so she introduced me to 4-H,” Roe said.

Roe found success in 4-H, winning state and national competitions — including a state win in insect collecting. He didn’t think insects would be his future. Music was his initial love.

A Tiger Band scholarship landed Roe at LSU. His guidance counselor encouraged him to forgo college and instead take over the family plumbing business, but he was undeterred.

“Any kid growing up in Louisiana, your dream is to go to LSU, right?” Roe said. “That’s something I wanted to do most of my life.”

Roe, a trombone player, initially studied music, but science was his true calling. He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology, a master’s in physiology and a doctorate in entomology, all from LSU.

Roe worked with LSU faculty who gave him early research opportunities that helped shape his career.

“We had unfettered access to the labs and to the research professors and to the equipment that they had. We got exposed to stuff like that at a very young age,” he said.

After LSU, Roe wrote and received a National Institute of Health Fellowship to work at the University of California, Davis in cellular and molecular biology. There he refined his skills in diagnostics, patents and lab management. He joined the faculty of NC State in 1983 and has been there for 42 years.

His innovations include a first-of-its-kind natural insect repellent approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, insect-resistant clothing without insecticides for military use and everyday life on the Time magazine top invention list of 2025, insecticide-free bed nets to kill mosquitoes and prevent malaria in Africa, a new insecticide spray made from volcanic rock for mosquitoes and ticks, and his first patent, a DNA-DNA electrochemical diagnostic to detect bad bacteria in food. Most recently he developed a method for using cell phones to identify insects in real time in cotton fields.

He said an idea can strike anywhere.

While visiting Disney World with his grandchildren, Roe, resting on a bench, struck up a conversation with a man whose daughter had a rare disorder and could not make the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase.

“I’m a biochemist, so I know exactly what that is,” Roe said. "That triggered in my head my work on bacteria that’s found in ticks called Rickettsia like R. montanensis.”

Roe described the bacteria as an endosymbiont in ticks that are transferred to humans. He is looking into whether it could be used to genetically reprogram that child’s body to produce that enzyme.

A process he wouldn’t have considered without the conversation with that father.

“That’s the invention process. That’s how all my inventions came about,” he said.

Roe has a rule in his laboratory, if you have an idea, say it and no one is going to make fun of you because you never know what idea is the one that’s going to stick.

He mentors his students to have that creative spirit and believes 4-H helped him with this.

“You want to encourage these kids to think out of the box and just think crazy thoughts because you don’t know if that’s the next thing.”

At the core of 4-H is a pledge to greater thinking and an effort to make the best better, and Roe has followed through on that pledge.

“It’s trying to improve the human condition in our country by coming up with a new insect repellent or a new clothing line. You’re making a difference,” Roe said.

Entomologist Michael Roe, pictured at a meeting in Quito, Ecuador, has spent his career developing life-improving inventions. Photo by David Hidalgo – Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIAP)