Elvira Cuevas

Cuevas lived and worked in Venezuela for 25 years. In 2001, she joined the faculty at UPR-RP where she is a professor in the department of biology. She is the director of the Center for Applied Tropical Ecology and Conservation at UPR-RP. In May 2004, Cuevas became an adjunct faculty member in the department of management and conservation of natural resources in the faculty of veterinary and zootechnology at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.

In 2000, Cuevas was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study plant sciences. In 2019, she became the first Puerto Rican woman named to the Latin American Academy of Science [pt] .

Cuevas was born on August 20, 1950 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She became interested in science at a young age and originally planned to go into medicine. She shifted to ecology after taking an ecology course under Herminio Lugo Lugo at University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus (UPR-RP). She graduated with a bachelor's and master's degrees in biology at UPR-RP. Her 1975 master's thesis was titled Changes in selected water quality parameters as influenced by land use patterns in the Espiritu Santo drainage basin. Cuevas completed a Ph.D. in ecology at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) in 1984. She was the first graduate in the field of ecology at IVIC and in Venezuela. Her dissertation was titled Crecimiento de raices finas y su relacion con los procesos de descomposicion de materia organica y liberacion de nutrientes en bosques del alto Rio Negro en el territorio federal Amazonas. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the International Institute of Tropical Forestry.