Ana Štěrba-Böhm

Ana Štěrba-Böhm (née Jenko; 9 June 1885 – 22 July 1936) was a Slovene chemist noted for being the first woman from Slovene Lands to obtain a doctoral degree in chemistry.

Early life and education Ana Jenko was born in Ljubljana, then part of Austria-Hungary, to a highly educated family. Her father was the physician Ludvik Jenko and her mother Terezija Jenko (née Lenče) who was also an educated woman, having studied with Ursulines in Ljubljana and in Bavaria, as well as spending a year in Moscow. She assisted her husband in his practice, and the couple actively participated in Slovene cultural life as promotors of Pan-Slavism. They had four children. All siblings obtained higher education, most notably Ana's sister Eleonora who went on to become the first Slovene female physician.

For five semesters, she studied chemistry as an extraordinary student, then as a regular student. Among her teachers were Bohuslav Brauner (theoretical and physical chemistry), Bohumil Kužma (anorganic chemistry) and her later husband Jan Stanislav Štěrba-Böhm (history of chemistry), while also classes in mineralogy, experimental physics, mathematics, history of philosophy, Czech and German language were noted in her curriculum. She probably spent the 1911 summer semester preparing her doctoral thesis on the topic of determining and separating three organic acids: succinic, malic and tartaric acid.