Alain Touwaide

Alain Touwaide ( born September 19, 1953 in Brussels) is a Belgian historian of medicine and the natural sciences and is currently at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, acting.

His education at the Université catholique de Louvain led by degrees in Classical Philology ( 1975), and Oriental philology and history (1977 ) and PhD (1981). The " Habilitation à diriger of recherches " ( ability to manage research projects ), he graduated from the University of Toulouse (1997). He has won numerous awards and scholarships, including the Earthwatch Institute, received and taught at several universities in Spain, Italy, Belgium and France.

His main area of ​​research are the medicinal plants of antiquity. His approach is transdisciplinary, that is not only philological and historical, but also botanical and medical, ethnological and anthropological, and thus represents a ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology dar. In 2005 received Touwaide a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a four-year research project " Medicinal Plants antiquity: A computerized database. " The therapeutic texts in ancient Greek are to be digitized, indexed and analyzed in the original and in translation.