An element is a chemical substance made up of a particular kind of atom and hence cannot be broken down or transformed by a chemical reaction into a different element, though it can be transmuted into another element through a nuclear reaction.
Almost 40 years separate Shirley Ann Jackson's achievement, as the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jedidah Isler, the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale.
She enrolled in graduate classes in engineering and applied to NASA for admission to the astronaut program. She joined the corps in 1987 and successfully completed her astronaut training, becoming the fifth black astronaut and the first black female astronaut in NASA history. She was the science mission specialist on STS-47, a cooperative mission between the U.S. and Japan.