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.
1951 Hiram Whittle becomes the first Black undergraduate to enroll at the University of Maryland. 1952 Manet Fowler becomes the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from a U.S. university (Cornell).