Alexandre Prigogine
Alexandre Romanovich Prigogine was a Russian-born mineralogist and ornithologist who worked in Belgium.
Born in a Jewish family, his father Roman Prigogine was a chemical engineer and his mother Julia Vichman, a pianist. His younger brother Ilya Prigogine later won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1921 the family left Russia and travelled through Lithuania and Germany to settle in Belgium in 1929. After studying chemistry at the Université Libre de Bruxelles he moved to the Belgian Congo in 1938 to study its mineral wealth.
Henri Schouteden convinced him in 1946 to take an interest in birds and to collect specimens in the east of the Belgian Congo. This new interest led to him publishing 94 papers on ornithology and he collected nearly 20,000 specimens. He described several new species including Albertine owlet, Schouteden's swift, Kabobo apalis and the Itombwe flycatcher and about 30 new subspecies. Congo bay owl, Prigogine's nightjar and Prigogine's greenbul have been named after him.
