Education
Boston University; Radcliffe College.
Boston University; Radcliffe College.
She was an expert on chrysomelidae (leaf beetles). Doris Holmes was raised in a middle-class family in Stoughton, Massachusetts. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1913 from Boston University and an Master of Arts in Zoology and Psychology from Radcliffe College in 1917.
Marrying the botanical 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. 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 United States Department of Agriculture. Her papers are held by the.
Forced to resign in 1933 by her husband"s employment at the Department (the law prohibited more than one member of a family holding a government position), she continued studying beetles as an unpaid Associate of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, District of Columbia