Anna Volkova

Anna Feodorovna Volkova (Russian: Анна Федоровна Волкова, d. 1876), was a Russian chemist working predominantly with amides. During the late 1860s, she was educated in chemistry through public lectures at St. Petersburg University. She was the first woman to graduate as a chemist (1870), the first woman member of the Russian Chemical Society, the first Russian woman to publish a chemical work, and regarded as the first woman at all to publish her own chemical research from a modern chemical laboratory.^[1]

From 1869, she worked in the laboratory of Alexander Nikolayevich Engelhardt. She led practical courses for female students in St. Petersburg under the tutelage of Dmitri Mendeleev. In 1870, she was the first chemist to prepare pure orthotoluenesulfonic acid and its acid chloride and amide. She was also the first to prepare paratricresol phosphate, a component of a now-important plasticizer, from para-cresol.^[2]

One of the craters of Venus is named after her.

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