Eleonora (Nora) Tsolakovna Gabrielian (Gabrielyan) (Armenian: Էլեոնորա Ցոլակի Գաբրիելյան; Russian: Элеонора Цолаковна Габриэлян) (born 22 February 1929) is a Soviet, Armenian born botanist, doctor of biological sciences, professor. Professor Eleonora Gabrielian is the president of the Armenian Botanical Society. She is a specialist in the fields of taxonomy, geography, evolutionary morphology and anatomy of plants. She has been awarded numerous awards and prizes during her career. Biography Early life Eleonora Gabrielian was born in Yerevan on 22 February 1929 to Tzolak Gabrielian and Zvart Cholakian. Her mother was an English teacher, her father was an electrical engineer who was repressed in 1937, rehabilitated posthumously in 1956. In 1946, Gabrielian completed secondary school and entered the Biology and Soil Faculty of the Yerevan State University, where at that time A. L. Takhtajan was teaching. After 2 years, she transferred to the Biology and Soil Faculty of Moscow State University, where she graduated with honors in 1951. In 1952-1955, she completed her doctorate in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) at the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russian: Ботанический институт им. В. Л.Комарова РАН), in the plant systematics and geography department. During her doctorate studies, she met her future husband Vladislav Agababian, also a botanist, future professor, who would become one of the founders of the Armenian school of palynology. Under the guidance of A. L. Takhtajan, she successfully completed her Ph. D. thesis on "Caucasian representatives of the genus Sorbus L.". Career In 1955, Gabrielian returned to Armenia and entered the Institute of Botany of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia as a junior researcher in the Department of Plant Systematics and Geography. In 1960, she became a senior researcher, in 1986 a leading researcher and in 1989 the head of the department of Plant Taxonomy and Geography in the Institute of Botany. Since 1989 she has been in charge of the Department of Systematics and Geography of the Institute of Botany of the Republic of Armenia and heading a multivolume edition of the Flora of Armenia. Thanks to numerous expeditions in Armenia and other regions of the Caucasus, as well as by studying extensive materials in various herbaria worldwide, Gabrielian successfully completed in 1974 a doctoral thesis on the topic "The genus Sorbus L. of western Asia and the Himalayas". In 1978, she published the fundamental monograph "Sorbus L. (Western Asia) and the