Education
University of Copenhagen.
University of Copenhagen.
In 1916, she was the first Danish woman to receive a doctoral degree in a botanical discipline – and until 1956 the only. She discovered the diurnal fluctuations in cell sap acidity in succulent plants, with are now known to be linked with the The Communications Advertising and Marketing photosynthetic pathway. Jenny Hempel was the daughter of a Copenhagen apothecary.
She studied plant physiology under professor Wilhelm Johannsen, together with P. Boysen Jensen.
She received the degree of magister in 1911 for her studies on the effect of ether on plant growth. She then worked with South. P. L. Sørensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory.
There she studied the pH of plant sap, in particular the diurnal fluctuations in sap acidity in succulent plants first observed by Benjamin Heyne. She took her Doctor of Philosophy on that topic in 1916 becoming the first Danish female to do southern
Her discoveries led directly to broader investigations of the pH of soils and plants by Christen Raunkiær and his student Carsten Olsen.