page_title: Mildred Dresselhaus
section_title: Career and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Mildred Dresselhaus / Career and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: President Barack Obama greets 2010 Fermi Award recipients Dr. Burton Richter, right, and his wife Laurose, and Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, third from right, and her husband Gene, in the Oval Office, May 7, 2012.
context_page_description: Mildred Dresselhaus, known as the "queen of carbon science", was an American nanotechnologist. She was an Institute Professor and Professor Emerita of physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dresselhaus won numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award and the Vannevar Bush Award.
context_section_description: Dresselhaus had a 57-year career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She became Abby Rockefeller Mauze Visiting professor of electrical engineering at MIT in 1967, became a tenured faculty member in 1968, and became a professor of physics in 1983. In 1985, she was appointed the first female Institute Professor at MIT
  Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1990 in recognition of her work on electronic properties of materials as well as expanding the opportunities of women in science and engineering. And in 2005 she was awarded the 11th Annual Heinz Award in the category of Technology, the Economy and Employment. In 2008 she was awarded the Oersted Medal, and in 2015 the IEEE Medal of Honor.
  In 2000–2001, she was the director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. From 2003 to 2008, she was the chair of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics. She also has served as president of the American Physical Society, the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences. Dresselhaus devoted a great deal of time to supporting efforts to promote increased participation of women in physics. In 1971, Dresselhaus and a colleague organized the first Women's Forum at MIT as a seminar exploring the roles of women in science and engineering.
  In 2012 Dresselhaus was co-recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award, along with Burton Richter. On May 31, 2012, Dresselhaus was awarded the Kavli Prize "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures."
  In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  As significant career innovator who held many patents, Dresselhaus was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
  Dresselhaus' former students include such notable materials scientists as Deborah Chung  and notable physicists as Nai-Chang Yeh, Greg Timp,.
  There are several physical theories named after Dresselhaus. The Hicks-Dresselhaus Model  (L. D. Hicks and Dresselhaus)  is the first basic model for low-dimensional thermoelectrics, which initiated the whole band field. The SFDD model (Riichiro Saito, Mitsutaka Fujita, Gene Dresselhaus, and Mildred Dresselhaus) 
  first predicted the band structures of carbon nanotubes. The Dresselhaus effect refers, however, to the spin–orbit interaction effect modeled by Gene Dresselhaus, Mildred Dresselhaus's husband.
  In 2017, Dresselhaus was the face of a General Electric television advertisement which asked the question "What if female scientists were celebrities?" aimed to increase the number of women in STEM roles in its ranks.
  In honor of her legacy, the American Physics Society (APS) created the Millie Dresselhaus Fund to support and empower more women in physics.
caption: President Barack Obama greets Dr. Mildred Dresselhaus, third from right, and Dr. Burton Richter, right, May 7, 2012.
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