Philippe Cuénoud (born July 8, 1968) is an entomologist and botanist of Swiss and Ukrainian[1] descent, living in Onex (near Geneva), who worked on the Psocoptera of Switzerland[2] and Papua New Guinea,[3] as well as on plant phylogeny.

[4][5][6][7] He found in 1991 the only then known population of Lachesilla rossica near Geneva (the species has been described from southern Russia and may still exist there - it was found in Albania in 2015 [8]) and contributed further to the knowledge of the flora and fauna of the canton of Geneva with the first mention of a slender-billed gull[9] (a Mediterranean bird species usually absent form Switzerland) and with the discovery of the first reported population of small-leaved helleborines.

Cuénoud also had a small part in the Ibisca project ("Investigating the Biodiversity of Soil and Canopy Arthropods"), an ambitious scientific programme led by Bruno Corbara, Maurice Leponce, Hector Barrios and Yves Basset (with the initial support of Edward O. Wilson), that produced new data on the biodiversity of the San Lorenzo rainforest, on the Caribbean coast of the Panama isthmus (in a paper written by the Ibisca team and featured on the cover of the prestigious scientific journal Science,[15] the total count of arthropod species of the forest was extrapolated to be about 25'000).

[17] He also studied the plant order Caryophyllales (made up of about 30 plant families, many of which are adapted to dry habitats - e.g. cacti - or carnivory: sundews and nepenthes, among others) with Vincent Savolainen and Mark Chase in Kew Gardens, sequencing the matK gene for many of its genera, and analysing the pigments of some of them (some Caryophyllales are known to produce betalains, an almost unique occurrence among Angiosperms).

[5][18][19] These results confirmed that Molluginaceae and Phytolaccaceae in their traditional sense are paraphyletic, and contributed to the recognition of the families Barbeuiaceae (containing a single liana species in its own genus, living on the island of Madagascar), Gisekiaceae (made up of the monotypic, African genus Gisekia), Limeaceae (comprising two genera of herbaceous plants from Africa, India and Australia) and Lophiocarpaceae (containing Lophiocarpus and Corbichonia, two genera of herbs from Africa and India).