Pioneer Virologist. She, with little formal education, became a Doctor of Science and a pioneer in virus imaging, identification and diagnosis. She discovered a new type of coronavirus. She published Manual for rapid laboratory viral diagnosis in 1979. She was born on 5 October 1930 at 10 Duntroon Street, Glasgow to Jane Dalziel (née Steven) and Harry Leonard Hart, a bus driver. She left school at 16 to work as a histopathology technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. She then moved to St Bartholomew's Hospital to continue her career. On 11 December 1954 she married Enrique Rosalio (Henry) Almeida (1913–1993), a Venezuelan artist with whom she had a daughter, Joyce. They moved to Canada where she worked at the Ontario Cancer Institute as an electronmicroscopist. Despite having few formal qualifications she was promoted in line with her abilities. Publications credited her for her work on identifying viral structure. Her abilities were recognized by A. P. Waterson, then Professor of microbiology at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School who persuaded her to return to England to work at the hospital. She developed a method to better visualize viruses by using antibodies to aggregate them. She worked on hepatitis B virus and the cold viruses. Almeida produced the first images of the rubella virus using immune-electronmicroscopy. David Tyrrell and Almeida worked on characterising a new type of coronavirus. This family includes the SARS virus and the SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID-19. Almeida followed Waterson to the Postgraduate Medical School in London where her contributions to articles were recognised by her award of a Doctorate. She finished her career at the Wellcome Institute. While working for Wellcome she was named on several patents in the field of imaging viruses. In 1970 Albert Kapikian spent six months in the UK where at the suggestion of his boss he studied Almeida's techniques. Back in the USA he used these techniques to identify a cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis – the Norwalk virus. Almeida left Wellcome and began to teach yoga but she returned in an advisory role in the late 1980s when she helped take novel pictures of the HIV virus. She published Manual for rapid laboratory viral diagnosis in 1979 for the World Health Organisation. Almeida died in Bexhill from a heart attack in 2007. Following the 2019–20 COVID-19 pandemic, her research came to notice again. The BBC described Almedia as "the woman who discovered the first coronavirus." Professor Hugh Pennington noted that the Chinese had used her techniques to identify COVID-19 and her work had helped the early identification.