astronomy

Rampa Rattanarithikul

Rampa Rattanarithikul is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Rampa Rattanarithikul rather than just read about it. In short: Rampa Rattanarithikul (Thai: รำภา รัตนฤทธิกุล; born 1939) is a Thai entomologist and taxonomist. She is a leading expert on mosquitoes, having discovered 24 new species and identifying at least 420 during her career.

Key takeaways

Rampa Rattanarithikul belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Rampa Rattanarithikul to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Rampa Rattanarithikul from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Rampa Rattanarithikul (Thai: รำภา รัตนฤทธิกุล; born 1939) is a Thai entomologist and taxonomist. She is a leading expert on mosquitoes, having discovered 24 new species and identifying at least 420 during her career. She was the lead author of the six-volume Illustrated Keys to the Mosquitoes of Thailand. The mosquito species Anopheles rampae and Uranotaenia rampae are named for her.

Career Rattanarithikul started her career as a lab technician in 1959 for a malaria mosquito research project of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). She directed lab assistants in making preliminary identifications of specimens, mounting and labelling them, and maintaining records. Through SEATO, she worked as a taxonomist for the Smithsonian Institution's mosquito collection during the summer of 1965. By the early 1970s, she had become a senior laboratory technician. She then worked as a medical entomologist with the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS). With AFRIMS, she studies vector species and maintains a mosquito collection at the AFRIMS museum in Bangkok. She studied medical entomology and Japanese in Kobe University in Japan, earning her doctorate in 1996. Specimens that Rattanarithikul have collected number in the hundreds of thousands. Many of her specimens were sent to the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit at the Smithsonian Institution, and her contributions account for as much as half of their 1.5 million specimens. During her career, she discovered 24 new species and identified at least 420 species of mosquito. Rattanarithikul is the lead author of the Illustrated Keys to the Mosquitoes of Thailand, a six-volume work detailing the distribution and characteristics of mosquitoes in Thailand. It was published by The Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health in 2006. She has also consulted for a project to develop a national entomology collection for Thailand at the Queen Sirikit Botanical Garden.

Awards and honours Rattanarithikul was presented with the American Mosquito Control Association's John N. Belkin Memorial Award in 2011 for "meritorious contributions to the field of mosquito systematics and/or biology". Two species of mosquito are named after Rattanarithikul, the Rampa Thai Nail Mosquito (Anopheles rampae) and Uranotaenia rampae. The subgenus Rampamyia is also named for her.

Personal life Rattanarithikul lives in Chiang Mai. Her husband is Manop Rattanarithikul, a lawyer and malaria expert. She founded the Museum of World Insects and Natural Wonders in Chiang Mai with her husband in 1999. The museum serves as a cabinet of curiosities for their collection of fossils, petrified wood, stones, and carvings as well as insect species. The museum has 10,000 species from 315 genera.

Selected publications Rattanarithikul, Rampa; Green, C.A. (1987). "Formal recognition of the species of the Anopheles maculatus group (Diptera: Culicidae) occurring in Thailand, including the descriptions of two new species and a preliminary key to females" (PDF). Mosquito Systematics. 18 (3–4): 246–278. Rattanarithikul, R; Harrison, BA; Panthusiri, P; Coleman, RE (2005). "Illustrated keys to the mosquitoes of Thailand I. Background; geographic distribution; lists of genera, subgenera, and species; and a key to the genera". The Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health. 36 (Suppl 1): 1–80. PMID 15916030. Harbach, Ralph E.; Rattanarithikul, Rampa; Harrison, Bruce A. (21 February 2017). "Anopheles prachongae, a new species of the Gigas Complex of subgenus Anopheles (Diptera: Culicidae) in Thailand, contrasted with known forms of the complex". Zootaxa. 4236 (1): 65. doi:10.11646/zootaxa.4236.1.3. hdl:10141/622190. PMID 28264338.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Rampa Rattanarithikul

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Rampa Rattanarithikul claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Rampa Rattanarithikul before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Rampa Rattanarithikul ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Rampa Rattanarithikul

In research: Rampa Rattanarithikul appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Rampa Rattanarithikul in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Rampa Rattanarithikul is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1939 births, 21st-century Thai scientists, 21st-century Thai women scientists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Rampa Rattanarithikul outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Rampa Rattanarithikul in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Rampa Rattanarithikul means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Rampa Rattanarithikul out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rampa Rattanarithikul in simple terms?

Why does Rampa Rattanarithikul matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Rampa Rattanarithikul?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Rampa Rattanarithikul.