Elena Barulina

Elena Ivanovna Barulina (; 1895 – 9 July 1957) was a Russian and Soviet botanist and geneticist who conducted pioneering research on lentils and their wild relatives. In 1930, she published the first map of their international distribution, in a 317-page monograph that became the standard reference for researchers. Early life Barulina was born in 1895 in Saratov, a major port on the Volga River. Her father was a manager in the port. After graduating from gymnasium in 1913 (with a silver medal) she entered the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Saratov. Career One of her professors, the Russian botanist and geographer Nikolai Vavilov, recommended her for graduate work and later invited her to accompany him to St. Petersburg where he would become Director of the Bureau of Applied Botany (now the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry). Once there, she became assistant head of the institute's experimental seed station and (in 1926) Vavilov's wife. Barulina became the center's expert on lentils, eventually classifying them into six groups. Based on the wild species found in association with early cultivars, she postulated that modern cultivated lentils (Lens culinaris) originated from a wild species Lens orientalis (now generally classified as L. culinaris subsp. orientalis.)