Sofia Davidovna Stepanjants

8 October 1934, Leningrad, Russia

Following is an auto-biography, kindly submitted by Sofia. I had to shorten it somewhat for editorial purposes.

Sofia Davidovna Stepanjants was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) on 8 October 1934 . Her mother was a teacher, her father an electrical engineer. It was her uncle Michael Ravitch - a famous Russion geologist of the arctic and antarctic zones - who drew her intrest to the natural sciences. For her later zoological education, she had the unique possibility to learn from Prof. P. Ushakov and Prof. D. Naumov.  She remained all her life at the Zoologiacal Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, first as a technician, then postgraduate student and ultimately senior scientist. Her dissertation (1967) was titled "Siphonophora of the USSR seas and the northern part of the Pacific Ocean". Her best known publication is certainly the monograph "Hydroids of the Antarctic and Subantarctic" (1979, in Russian). Besides these works, S. Stepanjants has published more than 100 papers, mostly on Siphonophora, Hydroidea and Stauromedusae (taxonomy, morphology, life-cycle, biogeography). She  participated in several marine expeditions to the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, and was also able to work several times at various marine biological stations in the Arctic and the far eastern seas of Russia. She also edited a large number of scientific publications.
Sofia has a few passions. One of them are the Rhinogradentia, imaginative animals that walk on their nose. She even discovered three marine species in Antarctica. Sofia Stepanjants likes drawing, writing poems, and growing flowers and vegetables. She was married for 25 years to the theatre producer Artur Stepanjants, a fact that is reflected on her perception of life as a theatre play. She has no children but a well educated foxterrier named Faba and a cat named Taras.