She was born on 7 May 1856 in
Rostov. Her father was Olimpiy Alekseevich Shumov, and her mother was Alexandra Mikhailovna Shumova. The family had 8 children, and Nadezhda was the youngest. Later, she and her family moved to
St. Petersburg where she spent her childhood and adolescence. After she successfully graduated from the
Mariinskaya Women's Gymnasium, she entered the
Vladimir Higher Women's Courses with a university style teaching to get a medical education. There she attended lectures of famous professors, such as
Dmitri Mendeleev,
Alexander Butlerov, and
Andrei Famintsyn. In 1874, Nadezhda returned to Russia and married
Nikolai Ziber, at that time an assistant professor of the Department of Political Economy and Statistics at
St. Vladimir University in
Kyiv. Also, he was one of the first advocates of
Marxism in Russia. In 1875, after Nikolai Ziber retired, they moved to
Switzerland, where Nadezhda continued to study medicine at the
University of Bern. During her studying at the university, Ziber-Shumova already had some scientific publications. The university also had a research group led by
Marceli Nencki, which Nadezhda joined in 1877.In 1880, she received her
Doctor of Medicine degree that was based on a thesis titled 'Contributions to knowledge on yeasts' from the University of Bern. The most important work on which Nadezhda and Marceli worked together was related to the structure of
hemin - a blood protein. Their research was based on a series of results on the decomposition of hemin into products carried out by Nencki's group over the years. This work was one of the first on this topic. In 1912, she became the first woman to receive all rights of a full member of the
Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine (contrary to the rule that existed in the institute, which did not provide for the assignment of such a title to women). In recognition of outstanding scientific work, Ziber-Shumova was awarded the title of professor. Thus, she became the first female professor of biochemistry and the official head of the research department. After the outbreak of the
World War I, Nadezhda focused her efforts on an organization for an infirmary for wounded soldiers. In 1915, Nadezhda was diagnosed with a severe malignant blood disease. She died on 11 May 1916 and was buried at the
Tikhvin Cemetery of the
Alexander Nevsky Lavra in
St. Petersburg. == Scientific Legacy ==