Catalogue description Colonial Office and successors: Anti-Locust Research Centre: Diaries and Papers of Sir Boris Uvarov, Director of Centre

Boris Petrovitch Uvarov was born in 1888 at Uralsk in South-Eastern Russia. By 1915 he had established his reputation as an entomologist and had acquired a special knowledge of locusts and locust control. In 1920 he came to England to take up an appointment at the Imperial Bureau (later Commonwealth Institute) of Entomology in London.

In 1929, Uvarov was given the task of organising and supervising the investigations into swarming locusts commissioned from the Commonwealth Institute by the Committee on Civil Research. As a result, the Anti-Locust Research Centre was established under the Colonial Office in 1945. It became the world's leading laboratory in the field of locust research and did much to further international co-operation in locust control. Uvarov retired from his directorship of the centre in 1959 but acted as a consultant and continued his research on grasshoppers and locusts until his death on 18 March 1970. He received many honours during his lifetime including that of Companion of St Michael and St George (1943) and a Knighthood of the same Order (1961).