There, her predilections were clear: “In math and science,” the yearbook declared, Mildred Spiewak is “second to none.”
After graduating she enrolled at Hunter College, where she intended to become a schoolteacher until she took an elementary
physics class with Rosalyn Yalow, a future Nobel laureate, who urged her to consider a career in science.
Nicknamed the Queen of Carbon in scientific circles, Dr. Dresselhaus was renowned for her efforts to promote the cause of women in science.
Mildred Dresselhaus, a professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research into the fundamental properties of carbon helped transform it into the superstar of modern materials science
and the nanotechnology industry, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass.
“I met Millie on my interview for a faculty job in 1984,” said Lorna Gibson, now a professor of materials science and engineering.
“Every morning she’d leave the house at 5:30, the first car in the parking lot every day,
and everyone she collaborated with she viewed as family,” said Ms. Cooper, Dr. Dresselhaus’s granddaughter, who is a graduate student at M. I.T.
“What if Millie Dresselhaus were as famous as any celebrity?”
For its part, carbon is as capricious as any celebrity.
Dr. Dresselhaus was a pioneer in research on fullerenes, also called buckyballs: soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon atoms
that can be used as drug delivery devices, lubricants, filters and catalysts.
