With a charming Southern drawl, Jerome Goddard speaks on topics that many people may think of as gross, but his expertise makes audiences around the world take notice.

A perfect example is his recent social media video on alpha-gal syndrome, often known as red meat allergy. Wearing a blue and green plaid shirt in his wood-paneled office, Goddard explained that this syndrome “really is a thing.”

“Alpha-gal is a type of carbohydrate, a kind of a sugar … and it’s in all mammals except primates. It’s not in humans,” he said. “So, what happens is when a certain tick––mostly the lone star tick––feeds on a mammal out there, a deer or whatever, the tick gets that alpha-gal in their gut from sucking up the blood.

“And then in the next stage when it feeds again on a human, it sort of spits that sugar––that alpha-gal––into your blood. It sort of spits a little. That’s what they do,” he said. “So, if you have a propensity to allergy, you can become allergic to that alpha-gal … Well, guess what? If you eat a steak, you have an allergic reaction.”

Goddard is the medical entomologist with the MSU Extension Service, a job he has held since 2008. For 20 years previously, he held a similar position with the Mississippi State Department of Health after starting his career in the Air Force. He originally intended to become a biology teacher.

“I couldn’t find a job anywhere and was distraught, and after about a month or so somebody called me from the Pentagon and said the Air Force, Army and Navy hire more entomologists than anybody. So, I went into the Air Force as a medical entomologist for three and a half years,” he said.

There, his team had the job of identifying specimens and consulting on vector-borne diseases from around the world.

“One time we got a call about a maggot that came out of somebody’s eye in New Guinea,” Goddard said. “I didn’t know anything about New Guinea bugs, but I said, ‘Send it on, and we’ll see what we can figure out.’

“It broadened my expertise. It forced me to know medically important bugs all over the world. Looking back, being in the Air Force was the best thing that happened to me,” he said.

Goddard earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Mississippi, then his doctorate degree from MSU in medical entomology in 1984.

He was at the Mississippi State Department of Health when Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast in 2005 and oversaw the state’s mosquito control program there. For almost 30 years, he taught two classes a year in medical entomology to second-year medical students at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

Today, he teaches medical veterinary entomology and forensic entomology at MSU. He has spoken around the world and has articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 200 scientific papers and five medical textbooks.

But his expertise on bed bugs likely brought him the most attention when he appeared in 2010 on the Colbert Report talking about this horrifying pest.

Goddard is originally from Booneville and has been married for 46 years to Rosella Goddard. They have two grown children and four grandchildren.