Doris Holmes Blake


Doris Holmes Blake, née Doris Mildred Holmes, was an American entomologist and scientific illustrator.
She was an expert on chrysomelidae.

Life

Doris Holmes was raised in a middle-class family in Stoughton, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in 1913 from Boston University and an M.A. in Zoology and Psychology from Radcliffe College in 1917. While at Boston University she became a member of Alpha Delta Pi. Marrying the botanist and plant taxonomist Sidney Fay Blake in 1918, she worked for the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1919 to 1928. From 1928 she worked at the Department of Entomology of the United States National Museum. Forced to resign in 1933 by her husband's employment at the Department, she continued studying beetles as an unpaid Associate of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D.C. until her death.
Some of Blake's entomological and botanical sketches, as well as her non-academic writing, are also included. The papers also include a number of photographs of Blake and her family and of entomologists, both at the Smithsonian and at USDA. Her papers are held by the Smithsonian Institution.

Works