Jane Stephens was a Dublin-born naturalist and world-renowned authority on sponges (Porifera), having also worked on coelenterates) including corah. A talented sportswoman in younger life) she excelled at hockey, tennis andfencing. Only the second Irish woman awarded Bachelor of Science, she worked at the Natural History Division of the National Museum of Ireland until marriage curtailed her career. A protegee of Robert Francis Scharff the Keeper in the Museum whom she later married, Stephens had a prodigious output of scientific publications in a fifteen-year period and later would have species named in her nonour. This biographical sketch is intended to give due recognition to the contribution made to zoology of a pioneering woman scientist working, on a difficult taxonomic group, in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
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