Varia Kipiani

Varia Kipiani
Kipiani in 1913
Born	Barbare Kipiani (1879-02-04)4 February 1879 Kutaisi, Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire
Died	1965 (aged 85–86) Brussels, Belgium
Other names	Varia Kipiani-Eristavi
Occupation(s)	Scientist, academic

Barbare "Varia" Kipiani (Georgian: ბარბარე "ვარია" ყიფიანი; 4 February 1879 – 1950-1965) was the first Georgian trained as a psychophysiologist and is recognized as a pioneering woman scholar of Georgia. Born into a noble family, Kipiani and her sisters were raised by her father after her parents' divorce. After graduating from St. Nino's School in Tbilisi in 1899, she taught in a school in Khoni for two years. Moving to Belgium, where her father had relocated, she entered the medical faculty of the Free University of Brussels in 1902. Unable to afford her tuition, Kipiani was mentored by Polish academic, Józefa Joteyko, who paid her school fees and allowed her to work in a laboratory. She wrote a paper titled "L'ergographie du sucre" ("The Ergography of Sugar"), which evaluated the use of sugar in alleviating fatigue. Her study won a silver medal from the Association des chimistes de France et des colonies ('Association of Chemists of France and the Colonies') in 1906. After completing her coursework in the medical faculty in 1907, Kipiani lectured at various universities and continued research with Joteyko on nutrition and fatigue. They jointly were awarded the Vernois Prize of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine in 1908 for their work on vegetarianism.

Impacted by biases against women scientists, the two women shifted their career studies toward child development, focusing on the emerging field of paedology. They studied various aspects of memorization and the senses, attempting to develop teaching methods that could improve society. In 1910, Kipiani received the Valentin Haily Medal at the Congrès des Typhlophiles ('congress to benefit the blind') in Paris for two papers she wrote about educating blind students. Among other studies, she published works on sensory psychology, the use of both muscles and vision in learning to write, auditory versus visual learning, and tropism. She was a proponent of teaching students to be ambidextrous and to use physical exercise to create bilateral symmetry in the body. Her works on ambidexterity argued that training both the dominant and weaker sides of the body would enhance motor and intellectual capacity and allow quicker recovery if one side of the body or brain was damaged. At the end of World War I, Kipiani briefly returned to Georgia, but when the Russian Red Army invaded the country, she moved back to Belgium. As paedology did not survive as a field of scientific study, upon her return to Brussels, Kipiani taught French and Russian at the University of Brussels.

In addition to her scientific work, Kipiani was one of the Georgian exiles who worked to preserve Georgian culture. Between 1910 and 1913, she curated and directed the collection of Georgian historical and ethnographic artifacts for the Palais Mondial ('World Palace'). The museum was founded by the Union of International Associations as a repository for collecting the world's knowledge. She also was responsible for preserving some of the estate of Salome Dadiani and her husband Prince Achille Murat as significant Georgian heritage. Although mainly forgotten after her death, 21st-century academics have begun to reevaluate her role in promoting vegetarianism in Belgium and France at the turn of the 20th century and her contributions to protecting Georgian culture.