Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran

Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (1845 to 1922) was a French physician who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 for his discoveries of parasitic protozoans as causative agents of infectious diseases such as malaria and trypanosomiasis. Following his father he took up military medicine, obtained his medical degree at the University of Strasbourg in 1867 and became Chair of Military Diseases and Epidemics at the École de Val-de-Grâce. Working in Algeria after 1878, he found that the protozoan parasite Plasmodium causes malaria and that Trypanosoma causes African sleeping sickness. He joined the Pasteur Institute in 1896, donated half of his Nobel prize money to found its Laboratory of Tropical Medicine, and in 1908 founded the Société de Pathologie Exotique.