Entomology Professor Roger LeBrun has had a hate/hate relationship with mosquitos ever since encountering clouds of them—carrying drug resistant malaria, which sickened him twice—as a platoon medic during the Vietnam War. Yet he’s also gone to great lengths to keep them alive. As a grad student at Cornell in the 1970s, he reared 26 different species of the bloodsuckers for research on preventing the spread of disease in developing countries.

When he ran out of the cow blood he procured from Cornell’s vampire bat lab, he would stick his arm in the mosquito cages.

“The price we pay for a Ph.D.!” he jokes. “My arm would swell, of course, but all things are relative, and it was nothing compared to Vietnam, when so many would descend on me that it appeared I was wearing a cardigan sweater. I’ve wanted to get back at them ever since.”

LeBrun’s latest research is aimed at preventing mosquitoes and ticks from transmitting pathogens, from Zika and dengue fever to Lyme disease and anaplasmosis.