French botanist. The son of a diplomat, Thomas Couvreur was born in Canberra, Australia, in 1979 and travelled with his family to numerous countries as a boy. He graduated from the French high school in Quito, Ecuador, in 1997 and attended the Université Catholique de Louvain la Neuve in Belgium for one year before moving to Montpellier to study tropical biology. He graduated in 2003 and is now working on his PhD at the University of Wageningen.

Although he undertook fieldwork in Ecuador for his master's degree, no official botanical collections were made on these field trips, the purpose of which was to investigate the palm biodiversity in an Amazonian forest on the slopes of the Andes and to sample two varieties of the domesticated palm Bactris gasipaes Kunth. His main collections so far come from a trip to Tanzania in November 2006 when he collected African Annonaceae, the focus of his current research into the processes of evolution, but also some begonias and Gesneriaceae. Two new species of Annonaceae were found in a high altitude forest (Couvreur et al, 2006). He also carried out some general collecting in Gabon in November 2005 and in Cameroon in March 2007.