Dame Helen Charlotte Isabella Gwynne-Vaughan, GBE (née Fraser; 21 January 1879 – 26 August 1967) was a prominent English botanist and mycologist.

[1] She was the elder daughter of Army Captain the Honourable Arthur Hay David Fraser (1852-1884; son of Alexander Fraser, 18th Lord Saltoun), and Lucy Jane (died 1939), daughter of Major Robert Duncan Fergusson, of the Rifle Brigade and the Royal Ayrshire and Wigton Rifle militia.

Lucy Fraser was a novelist and extra lady-in-waiting to HRH Princess Beatrice;[2][1][3] in 1887, having been widowed, she remarried, to diplomat Francis Hay-Newton.

[1] Due to her stepfather's career, Fraser spent a large amount of her youth living abroad and was educated mainly by governesses.

[3] Having completed her bachelor's degree, she spent 1904 working as a demonstrator for mycologist V. H. Blackman at University College, London.

[7] This was a role that Mary Baxter Ellis had turned down as she preferred to lead the volunteer First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs).

While she was at Royal Holloway College she and Louisa Garrett Anderson co-founded the University of London Suffrage Society.

[10] In 1911, she married David Thomas Gwynne-Vaughan FRSE FLS (1871–1915), whom she had succeeded as head of the botany department at Birkbeck College, London.

[13] In the 1929 King's Birthday Honours, she was promoted to Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) "for public and scientific services".

[18] English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque in Gwynne-Vaughan's honour in March 2020, placed on the house on Bedford Avenue in Bloomsbury London, where she lived for nearly 50 years.