Helia Bravo Hollis was a renowned botanist and made great contributions to the study of cacti. She was born in 1901 in Mixcoac, an area in southern Mexico City. In her youth, she was renowned for her achievements, receiving a diploma of achievement from President Porfirio Diaz. In 1919, she entered Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory High School) where she met Isaac Ochoterena to study protozoa of Mexico. Her earliest accomplishments in the field of biology were eight works on a variety of protozoa found in reptiles and amphibians (1921-1929) through partnership with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). By 1927, she was the first certified female Biologist in all of Mexico, and by 1929 was seen as a productive member of the Institute of Biology. Due to her hard work, she was then chosen to create and curate the Herbarium and commissioned to study Cactaceae (cacti, nopales, and many other species).
In 1930, she published her first botanic work in the first volume of Anales del Instituto Biologia and her undergraduate thesis was a contribution to the study of Lemnaceae, which had not been studied extensively before she took it on. She obtained her MS in Biological Scienes in 1931 from UNAM. She continued working within the Institute of Biology at UNAM. By 1937, she published a book, “The Cacti of Mexico”, which highlighted her expertise and proficiency in the field. She continued to work as a botanist throughout the rest of her career with stints at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN), Institute of Biological Sciences, and at the National Herbarium. She co-founded the Mexican Cactology Society and promoted the creation of the botanical garden at UNAM, where she eventually served as its director (1959).
Today, we know Bravo Hollis through her work as a pioneer of botany and we see that reflected through the acclaim of her colleagues naming two genera after her: Heliabravoa and Bravothrips. She had more than 160 publications to her credit. The Botanic Gardens at UNAM also bear her name in recognition of her achievements and accolades.
Sources:
- https://thedailygardener.org/otc20190930/
- https://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2019/03/helia-bravo-hollis.html
- https://plants.jstor.org/stable/10.5555/al.ap.person.bm000001007
Featured Image:
By Planckarte – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69928906
