Margarita Bravo Hollis was born on 10 June 1911 in Mixcoac, then part of the Mexican Federal District separate from Mexico City.
[1] In 1955, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship[4] for "studies of the trematode parasites of fishes";[1] during then, she worked under Harold W. Manter at the University of Nebraska.
[3] Returning to UNAM, she served as curator of the Institute of Biology's Helminthological Collection from 1960 to 1980, publishing a catalogue for them in 1973.
[3][5] In 1970, she was honored with a special volume of the Annals of the Institute of Biology of the Zoology series.
[3] Marcos Rafael Lamothe-Argumedo, whom she once worked with in her capacity as an academic advisor, called her "one of the pillars of helminthology in Mexico".