Ynés Enriquetta Julietta Mexia

Ynés Enriquetta Julietta Mexia was a botanist notable for her extensive collection of novel specimens of plants originating from Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. She discovered a new genus of Asteraceae, named Mexianthus after her, and accumulated some 145,000 specimens for botanical study over the course of a relatively short career. 

Born in Washington, D.C., as the daughter of a Mexican diplomat father and an American mother, Mexia was educated in Philadelphia, Maryland, and Ontario. She moved to San Francisco in 1909 and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in 1921, where she began taking botany classes and going on botanical excursions with the Sierra Club into the mountains. Over the next thirteen years, Mexia traveled from the northern regions of Alaska to the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, her main destinations for collecting specimens. She also conducted the first general collection of flora in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and spent extensive time in the Sierra Nevada. 

Her specimens are housed at the California Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Gray Herbarium (at Harvard), the New York Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. National Arboretum, as well as museums and botanical gardens throughout Europe. 

Mexia published several articles and coauthored Brazilian Ferns Collected by Ynés Mexía (1932) with Edwin Bingham Copeland. Among the 145,000 plant specimens that she collected, five hundred were new species (mostly spermatophytes). At least two new genera, Mexianthus mexicanus Robinson (Compositae) and Spumula quadrifida (Pucciniaceae), have been described from her work. Though she began her scientific career late in life, Mexia left an extraordinary legacy–more than fifty species have been named after her, and botanists continue to study and catalog her collections today.