Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (18 June 1845 – 18 May 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.

He discovered that the protozoan parasite Plasmodium was responsible for malaria, and that Trypanosoma caused trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness.

His father was an army doctor and a professor of military medicine and epidemiology at the medical school, École de Val-de-Grâce in Paris.

[4] Following his father he chose military medicine and entered the public health schools, simultaneously at École Impériale du Service de Santé Militaire (Saint Martin Military Hospital) in Paris and the Faculté de Médecine (Department of Medicine) of the University of Strasbourg in 1863.

[4] In 1867, he submitted a thesis titled Recherches expérimentales sur la régénération des nerfs (Research Experiments on the Regeneration of Nerves) by which he earned his medical degree from the University of Strasbourg.

After serving at the battles of Gravelotte and Saint-Privat, he was posted to Metz, where the French were eventually defeated and the place occupied by Germans.

In 1874, he qualified a competitive examination by which he was appointed to the Chair of Military Diseases and Epidemics at the École de Val-de-Grâce, a position his father had occupied.

[4] Working at military hospitals in Bône (now Annaba) and Constantine, he began to have experience in the study of blood infection as malaria was prevalent.

In 1894 he was appointed Chief Medical Officer of the military hospital at Lille and then Director of Health Services of the 11th Army Corps at Nantes.

In 1896, he entered the Pasteur Institute as Chief of the Honorary Service to pursue full-time research on tropical diseases.

He continued to investigate other cases of malaria and reported his discoveries on 24 December to the Société médicale des hôpitaux de Paris.

Laveran's discovery was widely accepted only after five years when Camillo Golgi confirmed the parasite using better microscope and staining technique.

[8] Laveran was a supporter of the mosquito-malaria theory[4] developed by British physician Patrick Manson in 1894, and experimentally proved by Ronald Ross in 1898.

The French Academy of Medicine established Ligue corse contre le Paludisme (The League of Corsica to Combat Malaria) with Laveran as its honorary president in 1902.

[26] Although he failed to make valuable observations, he was the first to identify the causative protozoan of a similar disease, now called visceral leishmaniasis.

In 1903, while at the Pasteur Institute, he received the specimens from a British medical officer Charles Donovan from Madras, India, and with the help of his colleague Félix Mesnil, he named it Piroplasma donovanii.

[38] He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 "in recognition of his work on the role played by protozoa in causing diseases.

Twenty-three names of public health and tropical medicine pioneers were chosen to feature on the School building in Keppel Street when it was constructed in 1926.