Team member

Maurice Kottelat (born 16 July 1957 in Delémont, Switzerland) is a Swiss ichthyologist specializing in Eurasian freshwater fishes. Kottelat obtained a License in Sciences at the University of Neuchâtel in 1987 and in 1989 a doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam. In 1980 he went to Thailand where he began his field research on Southeast Asian and Indonesian fresh water fishes.[3] In 1997 he wrote an important revision on the genus Coregonus, which includes the fish species from Lake Geneva, Lake Constance and other lakes in Switzerland.[4] Together with Dr. Tan Heok Hui he worked in Sumatra, where they discovered Paedocypris progenetica, which is considered the smallest fish in the world.[5] In 2007 he published a Handbook of European Freshwater Fishes together with Jörg Freyhof. Kottelat has described more than 440 fish species new to science. In 2006 he was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa degree at the University of Neuchâtel. Kottelat is the former president of the European Ichthyological Society. He is a commissioner of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. For most of his career, he has held no academic position but worked as a “freelance taxonomist”.