Dr. Allen Brady of Holland, Michigan, who retired as a professor emeritus of biology in 2000 after more than three decades on the Hope faculty, died on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024. He was 91.
His major interests were invertebrate zoology, systematics and evolution, but he was especially well-known, both on-campus and off, for his expertise and interest in spiders. As a leading expert, he was invited to study and help classify the spiders in a variety of collections, including more than 50,000 preserved spiders from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he continued to conduct research well into retirement. He delivered his last professional paper and had his last publication in 2017.
Brady graduated from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and then served in the U.S. Army for two years. He had initially planned on going into marine biology, but he started working with spiders — in which he’d been interested while growing up in Texas — while subsequently pursuing his master’s degree at the University of Houston.
He first taught at Hope as a Kettering Teaching Intern for a year, after completing his doctorate at Harvard in 1964. Following a year teaching at Albion College, he returned to Hope in 1966 as an assistant professor of biology, progressing through the ranks to professor in 1972 and chairing the department from 1981 to 1984. He also held a visiting professorship at the University of Florida during 1972-73.
He mentored Hope students through collaborative research throughout his time at the college, including in retirement. In 1988, former student Dr. Robert Wolff ’74 named a new species of spider "Cyclocosmia bradya" in his honor.
Brady was a past president of the American Arachnological Society, and received awards from the National Science Foundation and other external agencies in support of his research. Popular interest in the 1990 film “Arachnophobia” provided opportunities for him to educate the general public about spiders through appearances on radio talk shows around the country.
The family will schedule a Remembrance of Life gathering at Dykstra Funeral Home (Northwood Chapel on Douglas Avenue) sometime in the spring.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Sara Choplin Brady, in 2023. Survivors include his children: Michael Brady; Kevin and Jennifer Brady; Melinda Brady-Osborne (son Adam Osborne); and Jennifer J. Brady-Johnson (Hope '92) and Robert Johnson (Emma, Colin, and Nicholas Johnson).