Rampa Rattanarithikul

Rampa Rattanarithikul (; born 1939) is a Thai entomologist and taxonomist. She is a leading expert on mosquitoes, 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 (SEATO). Through SEATO, she worked as a taxonomist for the Smithsonian Institution'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 and maintains a mosquito collection at the AFRIMS museum in Bangkok.

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.

Personal life Rattanarithikul lives in Chiang Mai. Her husband is Manop Rattanarithikul, a lawyer for their collection of fossils, petrified wood, stones, and carvings as well as insect species. The museum has 10,000 species from 315 genera.

Selected publications