Colette Cusset
French botanist and botanical collector (1944 - )
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Colette Cusset, born on 28 June 1944, is a French researcher and botanist. She specializes particularly in Podostemaceae found on the African continent, discovering and cataloging several species.
Her contributions to African botany led scientists to name a species of Podostemaceae in her honor in 2016.
Biography
She was born in 1944. She obtained her doctorate at the end of her studies.[1] In 1969, she was appointed as a research assistant at the National Museum of Natural History.[2] Later, within this institution, Cusset was the first to digitize botanical data from the regions covered by her research, between 1985 and 1988.[3]
She is partly known for having described two new genera of Podostemaceae, "Djinga" and "Zehnderia", and 18 new species, in addition to renaming 35 others.[1][4] Her choices in reorganization and renaming subsequently opened new avenues for research.[5]
Legacy
Some of her work was described as "foundational" by other scientists.[6] In 2016, a species of Podostemaceae from Ivory Coast was named in her honor by Ghanaian and British botanists Gabriel Ameka and Martin Cheek, "Macropodiella cussetiana".[7]