Alain Touwaide

Who is Alain Touwaide?

Alain Touwaide is a US historian of medicine and sciences of Belgian origin currently researching at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C.

His education includes first degrees in classics as well as oriental philology and history and a PhD in classics, all earned at the University of Louvain. He received his habilitation à diriger des recherches at the University of Toulouse. 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 twelve languages. 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.