Portal:Crustaceans/Selected biography/11

Michèle de Saint Laurent (December 9, 1926 – July 11, 2003) was a French carcinologist. She was born on December 9, 1926 at Fontainebleau, near Paris. She studied general biology at the University of Paris under Pierre-Paul Grassé, earning her Diplôme de Licence in 1954. She started undertaking scientific research even before finishing her degree, and the resulting paper brought her into contact with staff at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. From 1955 until 1960, she worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), at their laboratory at Banyuls-sur-Mer; thereafter, she returned to the Paris museum.

The first major focus of Michèle de Saint Laurent's work was the systematics of hermit crabs. She also investigated other decapod crustaceans, particularly the Thalassinidea. As a result of this work, she was invited in 1974 to visit the Smithsonian Institution and was given an unidentified specimen which had been caught by the Albatross expedition in 1908. She and Jacques Forest realised that it represented a living relative of the Glypheoidea, a group previously thought to have been extinct since the Eocene. They described the new genus together in 1975, as Neoglyphea. De Saint Laurent's later work included a new classification of crabs (involving the recognition of a new section, Eubrachyura), and three new superfamilies (Axioidea, Enoplometopoidea and Retroplumoidea), as well as various works on the decapods of hydrothermal vents.