Philippe works at the Museum Nationalle d’Historie Naturelle (MNHN) in Paris, France.   He has been the lead Taxonomic editor for Mollusca in WoRMS, and has appointed many of the subsequent editors for this species-rich taxon. Philippe was also a leading scientist in the European Register of Marine Species that was a precursor to WoRMS.

Chaired by Michelle Klautau (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil), a jury of five WoRMS editors (M. Klautau, N. Shenkar, C. Boyko, T. Molodotsova and N. Bailly) made the selection and the full citation is as follows:   

This award is given not only in recognition of the recent involvement of Philippe Bouchet in the creation and the editorship of the WoRMS Global Species Database (MolluscaBase) and his impressive data encoding statistics (see the WoRMS statistics page graphs, http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=stats), but also of his long-standing involvement in biodiversity databasing both within and outside of WoRMS, evidenced by his participation in CLEMAM and the compilation of a dataset of all mollusc higher rank names in the mid-1990s (both now incorporated into WoRMS), in ERMS in the late 1990s which was the starting point of  WoRMS, and in Fauna Europaea early 2000s. We also recognize and applaud his support in the MNHN for numerous other initiatives including the Catalogue of Life and FishBase, as well as for the computerization of collections. In addition, through his publications, Philippe has made use of these databasing efforts, promoted the development of Global Species Databases, and disseminated information on the existence of biodiversity information systems throughout the global community of biologists.

On behalf of the Steering Committee of WoRMS,  we offer Philippe our sincerest congratulations.