Argentine botanist and curator at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Lourteig specialised in the flora of her home country and the Ranunculaceae, Lythraceae and Oxalidaceae families. Alicia Lourteig was born to a French father and Castillian-Argentine mother in Buenos Aires, and studied pharmacy and biochemistry to doctorate level (1946). From 1938 she worked as a botanist at the Miguel Lillo Institute in Tucuman, going on to the Darwinion Botanic Institute in San Isidro in 1947. Here, her work allowed her to travel to all the great herbaria of North America and Europe and eventually she left Argentina for Paris in 1955, to take up the curatorship of New World collections at the Paris Museum of Natural History (her talents having been spotted by the French botanist, Henri Humbert). In Paris she continued to study plant families of Argentina, widening her field of interest to other neotropical and temperate taxa in South America (focusing on the Lythraceae, Ranunculaceae, Mayacaceae and Oxalidaceae). She was also deeply interested in the history of botany in South America and the Antilles, particularly the explorers Bonpland, Mutis, Surian and Plumier, and organised their collections in the Paris herbarium so that they were easily available for other researchers. In terms of her own collecting, Lourteig traversed not only the difficult terrain of tropical South America but also made two voyages to the French Antarctic Lands in 1963-1964 and 1969. She published more than 200 papers in her lifetime, served as editor of Lilloa and as treasurer of the Flora Neotropica project from 1977 to 1994. She was honoured with many awards including the Millennium Award presented at the XVI International Botanical Congress. Lac Alicia in the French Antarctic Lands and a footpath in one of the Serro de Mar bio reserves in Brazil are both named in her honour, as well as several plant species and genera.