Dr. Marie Maynard Daly became the first African American woman to receive a Ph. D. in chemistry in the U. S.
On Jun. 3, 1947, Dr. Marie Maynard Daly became the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University in the United States. At the time, she didn’t know she was making history.
Working with Mary Letitia Caldwell, who was then the only female chemistry professor at Columbia, Marie Maynard Daly took less than three years to complete her thesis: “A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch.”
The work was a valuable contribution to research on how enzymes break down food, and it marked a historic turning point. The day that Daly successfully defended her thesis, she became Dr. Daly, the first Black American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the U.S.
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Source: American Chemical Society
Credit: Photo: Marie Maynard Daly, Queens College Silhouette Yearbook, 1947. Courtesy: Wikipedia.
