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.
On September 12, 1992, she was the first black woman in space. Her name is Dr. Mae Jemison. Dr. Jemison was born in Alabama on October 17, 1956, and raised in Chicago. She did well in school from a young age and was able to go to Stanford University on scholarship at the age of 16. She graduated in 1977 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a B.A. in African-American Studies. She attended medical school at Cornell University and became an MD in 1981.