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Mrs. Vasanthy Georges, Research Director at the IFP, awarded Knighthood in the French Order of the Academic Palms
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Mrs. Vasanthy Georges received on July 14th 2006, the medal of Knighthood of the Academic Palms as a tribute to her eminent contribution to missions of research, training, and diffusion of knowledge gathered within the French Institute of Pondicherry.
Mrs. Vasanthy joined the IFP as soon as 1970, which made her the first woman to be recruited at the IFP as a scientific and one of the first active Indian women in her field of competencies.
During the years that followed, she played a central role in the studies that were to make the palynology laboratory of the IFP, the world reference with what pertains to the identification of weed species in South India. The Institute also owes to Mrs. Vasanthy, a pioneering role in the usage of electronic scanning and transmission microscopes, for the making of microphotographies of pollens, innovative technique at that time, which allowed the publication of many reference atlases, one of which was the “ mountain pollens of South India”. (Vasanthy 1976).
Her doctoral thesis, defended in 1985 is such a reference to the point of having been indexed at the library of the United-States’ Congress, which is extremely rare for a document of this type.
With all the energy that characterizes her, Ms. Vasanthy presently devotes her last few months at the IFP, to finalize a monumental iconographic catalogue of pollens and trees of South India gathering 345 botanical species.