Mary Racelis is Professorial Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ateneo de Manila University, a well-known research scientist and a specialist in urban poverty, development, social policy and civil society. She was former director of the Institute of Philippine Culture.
She joined the Ateneo faculty in June 1960, the first woman professor in the college. Fr Frank Lynch, S.J., then starting both the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (DSA), invited her to be among his first staff members.
Dr Racelis was born in Manila in 1932 of a Filipino father and American mother. She received her elementary education in the Philippines, and finished high school and college in New York at Cornell University in Sociology and Anthropology in 1954. She returned to the Philippines with her husband, Helmuth Hollnsteiner, in 1955, and completed her MA in sociology at the University of the Philippines in 1960. In 1975, De La Salle University awarded her a doctorate in the social sciences ,em>honoris causa. In 2003, the Ateneo de Manila University awarded her a doctorate in humanities honoris causa.