United States entomologist. Born in Oberlin, Ohio, Charles Henry Tyler Townsend was an assistant to the entomologist Charles Valentine Riley while studying medicine at Columbia College in South Carolina. He held a variety of positions during his long career, beginning as an instructor at the Agriculture College of New Mexico in Las Cruces (1891-1893).

In 1893 he exchanged positions with Theodore D.A. Cockerell and for one year was curator of the Jamaica Institute in Kingston. On his return to the United States he was appointed entomologist with United States Department of Agriculture. In 1898 he returned to the agricultural experiment station at Las Cruces and later started the Townsend-Barber Zoological Company with his co-collector C.M. Barber. From 1904 to 1906, he was a professor in the Philippines, returning to the United States as an expert on the Asian gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar.

In 1908, at the age of 45, he was finally granted a BS degree, from George Washington University, and the following year became director of an experiment station in Peru. After four years, he went to a research laboratory in Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts, to complete a study of Bombyx, which earned him a PhD in 1914, and was then appointed to succeed D.W. Coquillet as curator of Diptera at the United States National Museum. For a decade, beginning in 1919, he worked primarily in Peru and Brazil. In 1929 he changed directions and founded a publishing house in São Paulo. He died in nearby Itaquaquecetuba in 1944. Author of more than 1,000 articles, half of them on entomology, he described about 3,000 new species and 1,491 new genera, mostly of Diptera. He also made substantial botanical collections.

Sources:
P.H. Arnaud Jr, 1958, "The Entomological Publications of Charles Henry Tyler Townsend (1863-1944)", Microentomology, 23(1): 1-63.