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.
April 16, 1921 â October 28, 2003. Marie Maynard Daly is the first African American woman to receive a doctoral degree â earning it from Columbia University in 1947. Prior to that, she attended Queens College in Flushing, New York, where she graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry.