Sheila Kuehl
Kuehl was born Sheila Ann Kuehl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, Arthur, was an airplane construction worker at Douglas Aircraft. He was Catholic and her mother, Lillian, was Jewish. As a child actress she performed under the stage name Sheila James.
Shelia Nash-Stevenson
Nash-Stevenson was born and raised in Lawrence County, Alabama. She graduated from Austin High School at the age of sixteen. She studied science and electronic and electrical engineering at Alabama A&M University in 1981. She was the first person to graduate from the Alabama A&M University physics masters program, where she was a NASA Fellow. She worked at Marshall Space Flight Center. Her professor, M. C. George, encouraged her to enter a PhD program. She was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in physics at the Alabama A&M University in 1994. During her postgraduate studies she had two children. She is three-times Magna cum Laude. At the time she was one of fewer than twenty African-American women with a physics PhD in the United States. She was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She worked on photon avalanche upconversion.