Mildred Dresselhaus

Renowned physicist Mildred Dresselhaus led pioneering work on carbon and its thermal and electrical properties. Known as the "Queen of Carbon Science," Dresselhaus explained the nanoscale properties of materials; laid the groundwork for later discoveries concerning carbon nanotubes, graphene and buckyballs; and developed the foundations for technologies leading to lithium-ion batteries.

Born Mildred Spiewak in New York City in 1930, she was the daughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her older brother, whom she described as a “child prodigy in both academics and violin,” provided Dresselhaus with violin lessons at an early age.

When she learned about Hunter College High School, “the only city-wide public high school of high academic standing available at that time to girls,” she was determined to pass its entrance exam. “I couldn’t even understand the language of these exams; it was like another world,” Dresselhaus recalled. “But, New York has really good libraries. I checked out books and got to work, and I figured out how to do all these problems. I took the exam, and I got into the school.”

Establishing herself as an excellent educator while she was still in high school, Dresselhaus accepted many tutoring jobs and saved the money she earned to later pursue a college education. By the time she graduated, her reputation as a tutor was so strong, she would command the rate of $5 an hour (equivalent to $60-$70 an hour today). Reflecting on her years of tutoring, Dresselhaus said, “The boys in the science classes were toward the bottom of my class. They used to always come to me for help. That might be somewhat significant in my story, because I never got the idea in college that science was a man’s profession.”

In 1951, Dresselhaus graduated from Hunter College with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. While attending Hunter, her remarkable ability to quickly retain and teach material to others had caught the attention of Nobel Prize-winner Rosalyn Yalow, who convinced Dresselhaus to pursue graduate studies and became her lifelong mentor.

Dresselhaus spent a year at Cambridge University on a Fulbright Fellowship before earning her master’s degree in physics from Radcliffe College (Harvard University) in 1953. In 1958, she earned her doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, where she studied under Nobel laureate and fellow National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Inductee Enrico Fermi. She then spent two years as a postdoctoral student at Cornell University before accepting a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Lincoln Laboratory.

At Lincoln, Dresselhaus laid the groundwork for her most noteworthy research on the physics of carbon. “I was happy to look for some area that was not so popular, where I controlled my own destiny,” Dresselhaus said in an interview with the National Inventors Hall of Fame. “So, I got into carbon science. It was unlike anything else that I had ever studied before.”

One of her early projects involved superlattice structures – layers of chemicals between layers of graphite – in which the graphite’s interaction with the introduced chemical would change its electrical conductivity. Such structures became the basis for lithium-ion batteries.

Dresselhaus’ research demonstrated that it is possible to use nanostructures to separately adjust electrical and thermal conductivity, and it showed how thermoelectric materials could be reconfigured to new classes of nanoscale energy-generating devices.

In 1967, Dresselhaus became the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Visiting Professor at MIT, and in 1968, she was invited to join the permanent MIT faculty as a full professor of electrical engineering. As she studied the curriculum for a class in which she taught solid state theory in 1972, Dresselhaus found herself uniquely positioned to write her own textbook on the subject. In 1983, she also became a joint professor in physics, and in 1985, she became the first woman to be named Institute Professor at MIT.

An influential advocate for greater participation in STEM, Dresselhaus received a Carnegie Foundation grant in 1973 to support her efforts in encouraging more women to study science and engineering. Throughout her career, she authored or co-authored nine books and more than 1,700 papers, and she received many honors. Her awards included the National Medal of Science in 1990, the Enrico Fermi Award and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2012, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2015. In 2019, the IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal was created to recognize “outstanding technical contributions in science and engineering.”