Mildred Dresselhaus

Her older brother was the violin prodigy, and free lessons reached her only because she was his younger sister. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Polish Jewish immigrants, raised in a poor Bronx neighborhood, she did piecework at home and spent summers in a zipper factory to help the family through the Depression. At music school she met college-educated parents, and learned that a good public high school for girls existed. She sent away for old entrance exams, studied them alone, and passed. Hunter College High School led to Hunter College, where she meant to become a schoolteacher until Rosalyn Yalow taught her modern physics and told her to aim higher. A Fulbright year at Cambridge, a year at Harvard, then a Chicago doctorate under Enrico Fermi.

She spent her career on one element. Graphite first, at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory from 1960, then graphite intercalation compounds, then carbon fibres, then the vibrational modes of the fullerenes. In 1992 she and three colleagues worked out the electronic structure of a single-walled carbon nanotube and predicted it would be metallic or semiconducting depending on how the hexagons wrapped, a year before anyone isolated one. Quiet work on a dull element had become one of the busiest fields in science. A 1993 paper with her student Lyndon Hicks proposed that low-dimensional structures could improve thermoelectric performance, and opened another.

When she arrived at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in 1960, women were about 4 percent of the Institute's undergraduates, and for decades she was one of very few women in the room. By her own account she did not set out to be an advocate and was drawn into it. In 1971 she and a colleague organized MIT's first Women's Forum, a seminar on the roles of women in science and engineering — then a Carnegie grant in 1973, a first-year engineering seminar built to give female students confidence, and in 1994 a letter she co-signed with 15 other women on the science faculty that forced the Institute to confront its own numbers. In 1985 she became MIT's first female Institute Professor. Female undergraduate enrolment now runs above 40 percent. She supervised more than 60 doctoral students and never stopped mentoring.

In 2000 Bill Clinton's Energy Department made her director of its Office of Science, which funds much of the physical-science research in the United States. She had already led the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The honours arrived late and heavily: the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2012, the first awarded to a single laureate, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2015 as its first woman. Somewhere along the way the field started calling her the Queen of Carbon Science. She died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge on February 20, 2017, at 86. In 2019 the IEEE named a medal after her.

Mildred Dresselhaus's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Intercalation compounds of graphite other
  Review article with Gene Dresselhaus, still cited decades later 1981
• Electronic structure of chiral graphene tubules discovery
  Predicted metallic or semiconducting carbon nanotubes a year before single-wall tubes were isolated 1992
• Effect of quantum-well structures on the thermoelectric figure of merit discovery
  With Lyndon Hicks — the founding paper of low-dimensional thermoelectrics 1993
• Science of Fullerenes and Carbon Nanotubes book
  Written with Gene Dresselhaus and Peter Eklund 1996
• Group Theory: Application to the Physics of Condensed Matter book
  Out of the MIT course she taught for decades 2008
• The MIT Women's Forum other
  The first seminar at MIT on the roles of women in science and engineering 1971

• November 11, 1930 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn to Polish Jewish immigrant parents Raised in the Bronx. The family took in piecework through the Depression.
• 1951 aged ~21 Graduates from Hunter College after Rosalyn Yalow steers her into physics She had enrolled meaning to become a schoolteacher.
• 1958 aged ~28 Takes a PhD at the University of Chicago, where she studied under Enrico Fermi She married the physicist Gene Dresselhaus the same year.
• 1960 aged ~30 Joins MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and starts work on graphite Women were about 4 percent of MIT undergraduates.
• 1971 aged ~41 Organizes the first Women's Forum at MIT
• 1985 aged ~55 Becomes the first female Institute Professor at MIT The Institute rarely has more than 12 at a time.
• 1992 aged ~62 Predicts the electronic structure of single-walled carbon nanotubes Metallic or semiconducting depending on how the hexagons wrap. Nobody had isolated one yet.
• November 24, 2014 aged 84 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama
• February 20, 2017 aged 86 Dies at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts She was 86 and still publishing.

• Rosalyn Yalow 1921–2011
  Invented radioimmunoassay with Solomon Berson, refused to patent it, and took the 1977 Nobel alone. mentor
• Enrico Fermi 1901–1954
  Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. taught by
• Maria Goeppert Mayer 1906–1972
  Physicist and Nobel laureate who developed the nuclear shell model, a fundamental account of atomic nuclei. preceded her in physics
• Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997
  Experimental physicist whose decisive work on parity violation transformed particle physics and challenged assumptions about natural symmetry. fellow physicist
• Marie Tharp 1920–2006
  Mapped the ocean floor by hand and found the Mid-Atlantic rift valley parallel career
• Barbara McClintock 1902–1992
  Cytogeneticist who discovered transposable elements and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. parallel career