Mexican botanist. Born in Salvatierra, Guanajuato, Graciela Calderón studied bio-medicine at the National Polytechnic Institute (I.P.N.) before embarking upon her bachelor's degree in biology at the National School of Biological Sciences. On completion of her undergraduate studies in 1952 Calderón spent the following year working for the Instituto Mexicano de Recursos Naturales Renovables, A.C. as a researcher before moving to the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí's Instituto de Investigación de Zonas Desérticas. Here she was employed as a researcher and a biology teacher between 1955 and 1957. In 1963 she returned to the I.P.N. where she was named a professor (titular 'C') in 1974 and began to work alongside her husband, the prolific plant collector and researcher Jerzy Rzedowski.
Particularly interested in enhancing the quality of biological teaching Calderón embarked upon a 25 year project with her husband to create a previously nonexistent manual to the plants of the Valley of Mexico as an educational aid. She dedicated herself to the coordination, design and editing of the Flora fanerogámica del Valle de México, which involved 64 authors and was published in three volumes in 1979, 1985 and 1990. Many of the monographs included in the manual were the product of theses that the pair directed. The project involved extensive collection of plant specimens from the region, the contributors between them amassing a collection of 250,000 herbarium sheets taken from some 50,000 individual plants and deposited in a vast array of herbaria worldwide.
Finally, since 1984 Calderón and her husband have been based at the Institute of Ecology's Centro Regional del Bajío del Instituto de Ecología, A.C. in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. Together they also coordinate and edit the Flora del Bajío y de regiones adyacentes, another mammoth undertaking involving further collection of specimens and the creation of a new herbarium in which to house them: IEB. The collection was completed in 1992 and from 1994 the intensity of her research has diminished somewhat in order to concentrate on her many editorial roles; she is on the committee for the journals Acta Botanica Mexicana, Chapingo, Boletín del Instituto de Botánica de la Universidad de Guadalajara and Polibotánica to name a few.
As well as publishing numerous taxonomic works on the Mexican flora, in 2008 she co-authored a book of historic interest on the principal plant collectors active in Mexico between 1700 and 1930. In 1993 she was named a level III researcher within the national system and has received a wealth of prizes and recognitions from an array of national and international academic institutions, as well as from the state government of Guanajuato for her work on the flora of that region.
Sources:
Personal communication with Jerzy Rzedowski (husband), October 2009.
