Dr Anna Mayer Kansky Prize winners announced

The Dr Anna Mayer Kansky Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis is awarded to doctoral theses that meet the criteria of excellence in their field and whose content represents a cutting-edge achievement and breakthrough in the scientific and/or artistic field.

The prizes are awarded annually to University of Ljubljana PhD students for outstanding doctoral work in the following fields:

• natural sciences,
• technique,
• Biomedicine and biotechnology,
• Humanities and education,
• social sciences,
• Art.

At its 15th meeting on 18 April 2023, the Doctoral Studies Committee of the University of Ljubljana adopted a decision to award the Dr Anna Mayer Kansky Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Work in all six fields.

The Dr. Anna Mayer Kansky Award for an outstanding doctoral thesis in the field of engineering also goes to our PhD student and collaborator Dr. Klemen Grm from the Machine Intelligence Laboratory.

The award ceremony will take place on Thursday, 22 June, at 14:00 in the Chamber Hall of the University of Ljubljana.

About Ani Mayer Kansky

On 15 July 1920, Anna Mayer from Loš pri Vipava, married name Kansky, was the first person in Slovenian universities to be promoted to Doctor of Philosophy. Between 1914 and 1918 she studied chemistry and physics at the Vienna Faculty of Philosophy. Due to the events that were already foreshadowing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the University of Vienna decreed after the end of World War I that students of Slavic nationalities had to leave the university, so in 1918 Ana interrupted her studies in Vienna and returned to Ljubljana. The following year, she resumed her studies at the newly founded University of Ljubljana, where she began researching the chemistry of starch. In 1920, she defended her thesis On the Effect of Formalin on Starch and became the first doctor of science at the University of Ljubljana. The fact that a woman was the first recipient of a doctorate at the oldest university in Slovenia has important symbolic value, as at that time academia was heavily male-dominated. The fact that the first doctorate was awarded to a woman was also a rarity in the world. Not only was she the first woman to receive a PhD from the first Slovenian university, but in a 1978 volume published by the University of Padua, Anna Kansky was ranked 72nd in the world for women who had received a PhD by 1920, which is certainly another remarkable achievement on a global scale. After defending her doctorate, she became the first woman to take up a position as a teaching assistant at the newly founded university. In 1922, she resigned as a researcher and went on to prove herself as an entrepreneur.