Born: 11 November 1930, United States
Died: 20 February 2017
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mildred Spiewak
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Mildred Dresselhaus (née Spiewak) was a Jewish-American physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist known as the “Queen of Carbon Science.”
Mildred Dresselhaus, a prominent physicist at MIT for 57 years, began her journey at Hunter, guided by Professor Rosalyn Yalow, a future Nobel laureate. She graduated in 1951 and pursued postgraduate studies at Cambridge and Radcliffe College, earning her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1958 under Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. #teachersgoals
After a postdoc at Cornell University, she joined Lincoln Lab before becoming MIT’s first female Institute Professor in 1985. In 1994, she advocated against gender discrimination at MIT.
Dresselhaus’s influential research spanned graphite, fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and thermoelectrics, contributing to the widespread use of thin graphite in electronics. Her work with lasers in the 1960s revolutionized the electronic structure of graphite. Later, she focused on ‘buckyballs,’ graphene, and enhancing the thermoelectric properties of nanowires.
Read more (Wikipedia)
Read more (Association of Women in Science)