Alain Touwaide

Alain Touwaide in 2013

Alain Touwaide (born 19 September 1953 in Brussels-Berchem Sainte Agathe) is a US historian of medicine and sciences of Belgian origin.He has been teaching History of Greek Medicine and its tradition at the University of California Los Angeles, during the academic year 2015-16.

His education includes first degrees in classics (1975) as well as oriental philology and history (1977) and a PhD in classics (1981), all earned at the University of Louvain. He received his habilitation à diriger des recherches (capability of directing research) at the University of Toulouse (1997). He won numerous prizes and grants, amongst others of the Earth Watch Institute, and has taught at several universities in Spain, Italy, France and Belgium. Touwaide is proficient in several languages.[1] His main research area is medicinal plants of Antiquity, his approach being transdisciplinary, that is, not only philological and historical, but also botanical and medical, ethnological and anthropological, constituting ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology. In 2005, Touwaide received a grant of the National Institutes of Health for a four-year research project “Medicinal plants of Antiquity: A Computerized Database”. Ancient Greek therapeutical texts are to be digitized, indexed and analyzed both in the original and in translation.

From 2007-2008 he was president of the Washington Academy of Sciences. He has been elected as a Fellow of the International Academy for the History of Pharmacy (1991), the Linnean Society (1997), the Washington Academy of Sciences (2003), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), and the Royal Society of Medicine, UK (2010). He is the co-founder and current scientific director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions and has been affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution from 2002 through 2016.

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