Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova

Recently returned from a tour through Europe, Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova is a devoted and loyal friend to Catherine the Great. Though they were once estranged because of Yekaterina's scorn of the lovers Catherine chose as lovers who in her eyes disgraced the court, it is a more mature and forgiving Princess who has returned. During her tour, Yekaterina procured the entrée to the society of the learned in most of the capitals of Europe due to her literary and scientific reputation. This also gained her the appointment as Director of the Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences in Russia, the first woman in the world to head a national academy of sciences. It was a failing institution that lacked prominence and intellectual respectability, something Yekaterina managed to restore in a critical time in the history of science. The transformation from natural philosophy practiced by gifted amateurs to a professional enterprise had just begun.