Unable to afford her tuition, Kipiani was mentored by Polish academic, Józefa Joteyko, who paid her school fees and allowed her to work in a laboratory.

After completing her coursework in the medical faculty in 1907, Kipiani lectured at various universities and continued research with Joteyko on nutrition and fatigue.

At the end of World War I, Kipiani briefly returned to Georgia, but when the Russian Red Army invaded the country, she moved back to Belgium.

She also was responsible for preserving some of the estate of Salome Dadiani and her husband Prince Achille Murat as significant Georgian heritage.

Although mainly forgotten after her death, 21st-century academics have begun to reevaluate her role in promoting vegetarianism in Belgium and France at the turn of the 20th century and her contributions to protecting Georgian culture.

[2][3] Kipiani grew up on her grandfather's estate near Kvishkheti, but when her parents divorced, she and her older sisters, Elisabet "Veta" and Nino, went with their father in 1883 to Batumi, where he was working in the judiciary system.

[6] The shock of his father's death caused health problems for Nikoloz, who moved abroad in 1890 to seek treatment, leaving his daughters in Tbilisi to attend St. Nino's School.

[7] He lived in France, Holland, Italy and Switzerland before settling in Belgium in 1895 and becoming the chair of Russian language studies at the Free University of Brussels.

After making a presentation which was well-received at the Sixth International Congress of Physiologists held in Brussels in 1904, the Polish scientist Józefa Joteyko invited Kipiani to work in her laboratory at the Solvay Institute of Physiology and paid for her tuition.

[19][21][23] She wrote to organizations in Georgia encouraging them to send books, pictures, or other items that could be added to the exhibit in order to improve exposure to Georgian achievements in education and technology.

[23] In 1908, Joteyko founded and became editor of the Revue Psychologique, a journal which explored developments in the field of psychology from a scientific and educational perspective.

[25] She published several articles in the journal between 1908 and 1914,[26] as well as various studies examining muscle memory, the adaptive multi-sensory practices of people with limited or no vision, vegetarianism, and ambidexterity.

She also served as an assistant to Akaki Shanidze,[1] the leading Georgian linguist and philologist, who had been one of the founders of Tbilisi State University, the previous year.

[45] By that time, Kipiani had earned her doctorate and was reported in the Australian Woman's Mirror as "Dr. Varia Kipiani-Eristavi, a distinguished professor at Brussels University".

[7][17] In 1940, following the onset of World War II, she began negotiations with Mikheil Tarkhnishvili [ka],[7] (also transliterated as Michael Tarchnisvili),[47] a Georgian priest working in Munich, to secure a monastery in Rome to protect the items.

[49][50] Tarkhnishvili, unaware of the Nazi plan, located the villa of publisher Salvatore di Carlo on the Via Alessandro Brisse in the Monteverde Nuovo neighborhood.

[50][51] He purchased the villa in 1943 with the bequeathed funds and supplemental monies provided by AMT IV operatives, which he was told came from a Georgian benefactor.

On 4 June 1944, Rome was liberated by Allied forces and all of the students as well as Tarkhnishvili were arrested when the partially-installed radio antenna was located at the villa.

One part of the device held the hand so that it was immobile and allowed the finger to be inserted into a tube which was attached to a stylus that recorded muscle contractions on a rotating cylinder.

[63] She noted that 25 grams of sugar dissolved in water or milk and given three times in half-hour intervals relieved fatigue within ten minutes without the toxic effects of wine or drugs.

[64] In a 1907 review for the Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, Walbaum noted that Kipiani had also compared the body's reaction to cane versus fruit-based sugars.

[59] The Yale study and others also confirmed Joteyko and Kipiani's findings that vegetarians recuperated more quickly from fatigue than did people who consumed meat.

[69] They published a follow-up study, "Le végétarisme et son influence sur la santé publique, le commerce, l'industrie et l'économie de la nature" ("Vegetarianism and Its Influence on Public Health, Commerce, Industry and the Economy of Nature") in 1909, which had been presented to the International Food Congress the previous year.

[81] In her 1913 paper, "Le rôle des tropismes et de la symmétrie dans la vie intégrale de l'être humain" ("The Role of Tropism and Symmetry in the Integral Life of the Human Being"), Kipiani discussed the importance of exercise to fully develop the body and eliminate the tendency for outside stimuli to promote growth in only one direction.

[84] Students of varying genders were asked to lift weights weighing 2 kg (4 lb) repeatedly every two seconds for twenty to thirty repetitions.

[87] Expanding her tests to include hearing, sight, and touch, Kipiani reported that these senses tended to be superior on the same side as the dominant hand.

[90] At the time Medard Schuyten, director of an internationally-known paedological laboratory in Antwerp was promoting the opposing view that focus should be on developing the body's naturally dominant side.

[90] She argued that teaching methods which encouraged students to use only one hand reinforced the principle of least effort and prevented the full development of both sides of the brain.

[17] Although she had many accomplishments in her lifetime both in science and in promoting Georgian culture, like other women internationally and in Georgia, Kipiani and her achievements were largely forgotten in the historical record.

[99][100] Sociologist Alexandra Hondermarck noted that their studies gained significant traction because they used innovative scientific methods to research vegetarianism.