Philippe Édouard Léon Van Tieghem

[2] Van Tieghem's father was a textile merchant who died of yellow fever in Martinique before he was born, and his mother shortly thereafter.

[3] One of five children, he obtained his baccalauréat in 1856, and continued his studies at the École Normale Supérieure, where after receiving agrégation, he worked in the laboratory of Louis Pasteur (1822–1895).

He is credited with creation of the eponymous "Van Tieghem cell", a device mounted on a microscope slide that allows for observing the development of a fungus' mycelium.

[1] Van Tieghem wrote extensively on the mistletoe family of Loranthaceae, with much of his taxonomic work surviving to the present day.

[12] Van Tieghem's primary grouping was into embranchements (branches), followed by sous-embranchement (sub-branches), classes, orders, families, genera, species and varieties.