Rampa Rattanarithikul ( th, รำภา รัตนฤทธิกุล; born 1939) is a Thai entomologist and taxonomist. She is a leading expert on

mosquito Mosquitoes (or mosquitos) are members of a group of almost 3,600 species of small flies within the family Culicidae (from the Latin ''culex'' meaning "gnat"). The word "mosquito" (formed by ''mosca'' and diminutive ''-ito'') is Spanish for "lit ...

es, having discovered 24 new species and identifying at least 420 during her career. She was the lead author of the six-volume ''Illustrated Keys to the Mosquitoes of Thailand''. The mosquito species ''Anopheles rampae'' and ''Uranotaenia rampae'' are named for her.

Career

Rattanarithikul started her career as a lab technician in 1959 for a malaria mosquito research project of the

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was an international organization for collective defense in Southeast Asia created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, or Manila Pact, signed in September 1954 in Manila, the Philipp ...

(SEATO). She directed lab assistants in making preliminary identifications of specimens, mounting and labelling them, and maintaining records. Through SEATO, she worked as a taxonomist for the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

's mosquito collection during the summer of 1965. By the early 1970s, she had become a senior laboratory technician. She then worked as a medical entomologist with the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS). With AFRIMS, she studies

vector species In epidemiology, a disease vector is any living agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen to another living organism; agents regarded as vectors are organisms, such as parasites or microbes. The first major discovery of a disease ...

and maintains a mosquito collection at the AFRIMS museum in Bangkok. She studied

medical entomology The discipline of medical entomology, or public health entomology, and also ''veterinary entomology'' is focused upon insects and arthropods that impact human health. Veterinary entomology is included in this category, because many animal disease ...

and Japanese in

Kobe University , also known in the Kansai region as , is a leading Japanese national university located in the city of Kobe, in Hyōgo. It was established in 1949, but the academic origins of Kobe University trace back to the establishment of Kobe Higher Com ...

in Japan, earning her doctorate in 1996. Specimens that Rattanarithikul have collected number in the hundreds of thousands. Many of her specimens were sent to the

Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit The Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit ("WRBU") is a US Army organization that conducts laboratory and field research on the systematics of medically important arthropods in support of epidemiological investigations and disease prevention and control ...

at the

, and her contributions account for as much as half of their 1.5 million specimens. During her career, she discovered 24 new species and identified at least 420 species of mosquito. Rattanarithikul is the lead author of the ''Illustrated Keys to the Mosquitoes of Thailand'', a six-volume work detailing the distribution and characteristics of mosquitoes in Thailand. It was published by ''The Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health'' in 2006. She has also consulted for a project to develop a national entomology collection for Thailand at the Queen Sirikit Botanical Garden.

Awards and honours

Rattanarithikul was presented with the

American Mosquito Control Association The American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA) is an American nonprofit organization and the world's leading organization dedicated to mosquito control. It was established in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1935 as the Eastern Association of Mosquito Co ...

's John N. Belkin Memorial Award in 2011 for "meritorious contributions to the field of mosquito systematics and/or biology". Two species of mosquito are named after Rattanarithikul, the Rampa Thai Nail Mosquito (''Anopheles rampae'') and ''Uranotaenia rampae''. The subgenus ''Rampamyia'' is also named for her.

Personal life

Rattanarithikul lives in

Chiang Mai Chiang Mai (, from th, เชียงใหม่ , nod, , เจียงใหม่ ), sometimes written as Chiengmai or Chiangmai, is the largest city in northern Thailand, the capital of Chiang Mai province and the second largest city i ...

. Her husband is Manop Rattanarithikul, a lawyer and malaria expert. She founded the Museum of World Insects and Natural Wonders in Chiang Mai with her husband in 1999. The museum serves as a cabinet of curiosities for their collection of fossils, petrified wood, stones, and carvings as well as insect species. The museum has 10,000 species from 315 genuses.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rampa Rattanarithikul 1939 births Living people Entomologists Women entomologists Thai scientists Kobe University alumni People from Chiang Mai province Taxonomists