Philippe J. R. Kok

Philippe Jacques Robert Kok (born 20 December 1970) is an African-born Belgian evolutionary biologist, herpetologist, and ecologist. He is an associate professor at the University of Łódź in Poland. His research focuses on endemism in the herpetofauna of the biogeographic region of Pantepui in northern South America, particularly the tepui mountains of Venezuela.

Biography Kok was born in Watsa, near the African Great Lakes region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He completed his secondary education in 1989 at the Athénée Royal Émile Bockstael in Brussels and enrolled at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) to study veterinary medicine, which he left in 1991. He then spent a year at the Institut Paul Lambin in Brussels studying biotechnology. At the age of 22, he decided to leave Belgium for the tropics and spent several weeks in French Guiana, where he began fieldwork in herpetology in the tropical rainforests of northern South America, his preferred field site thereafter.

Returning to Belgium, Kok became a scientific collaborator at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (IRSNB) in 1994. From 1996 onward, as part of a project on the systematics and biogeography of the Neotropical herpetofauna (focused on the Guiana Shield), he carried out numerous field expeditions in French Guiana, Guyana, and Venezuela. In 1998, Kok and colleagues from the IRSNB participated in a project on the reptile and amphibian diversity of Amphoe Na Haeo in Loei Province, Thailand, in collaboration with Srinakharinwirot University in Bangkok. In 1999, Kok became the Belgian government's CITES expert on amphibians and reptiles. Between 2003 and 2007, he worked as an independent scientific consultant, notably for Pairi Daiza (then Parc Paradisio) in Brugelette, Belgium. From 2004 to 2008, he received funding from the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation for a Global Taxonomy Initiative project on the biodiversity of the herpetofauna of the Kaieteur National Park in Guyana (later expanded to the Guiana Shield), which aimed to train local scientists in taxonomy and parataxonomy.

In 2025, Mark Wilkinson and Gabriela B. Bittencourt-Silva named Rhinatrema koki, an amphibian found in Guyana, after Kok.