IEEE Spectrum May, 2015 - 52

"Her influence
is all around us,
in the cars we
drive, the energy
we generate,
the electronic
devices that
power our lives"

engineers will turn these things, fabricated from carbon-based
materials such as graphene, into the systems that will carry
computing into its next era.
Now, after a half century of quiet work, she is accumulating
accolades. This past November, in a ceremony at the White
House, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the U.S. government's highest civilian honor. "Her
influence is all around us, in the cars we drive, the energy we generate, the electronic devices that power our lives," Obama said.
And this June, the IEEE will confer upon Dresselhaus its
highest accolade, the IEEE Medal of Honor, for her "leadership and contributions across many fields of science and engineering." She is the first female Medal of Honor recipient in
the award's nearly century-long history. (Before the IEEE's
formation, the Medal of Honor was presented by the Institute of Radio Engineers, which merged with the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1963 to form the IEEE.)

hile Dresselhaus has blazed a path for researchers eager to exploit the magic of carbon computing, for most of her 84 years her own pathway
has been anything but obvious. It was muddled
by a world that had trouble accommodating a
visionary engineering researcher who was also
a caring and thoughtful mentor-as well as a mother of four
(and today a grandmother of five).
The daughter of destitute Eastern European émigrés, a product of Great Depression and World War II-era New York City
schools and their melting-pot culture, Dresselhaus (née Spiewak)
as a child imagined that the only career open to her was that of
schoolteacher. Even that was a bit of a stretch, given the time
and place: The kids in her neighborhood and in her struggling
primary school in the Bronx were mostly uninterested in their
studies. But a mysterious force soon intervened. It was music.
Both her grandfather and great-grandfather served as town
cantors in her father's ancestral village of Dzialoszyce, Poland.
So when her older brother, Irving, began playing the violin
with uncommon grace at age 4, his gift wasn't a complete
surprise. Their parents secured a scholarship for him at New
York City's prestigious Greenwich House music school. And
when Mildred was herself 4 or 5, she began studying music
there, too. Although she stopped taking lessons at Greenwich
House at 13, she has never abandoned her beloved violin.
Dresselhaus still plays every day. "I had his hand-me-down
violin," she says. "I inherited all the things he left behind."
And it was music that brought her into contact with more
ambitious peers at the Greenwich House school. "It was
obvious-education was important," she says she realized not
long after arriving at the school, in 1934 or '35. "That was the
most important lifelong thing I learned at the music school."
She would probably have again followed her brother's
footsteps several years later, into the legendary Bronx High
School of Science, but in those days Bronx Science was for
boys only. So she set her sights on Hunter College High School,
MAY 2015

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-Barack Obama

a New York City preparatory school for girls. While studying
for her entrance exam, she discovered to her delight how easily math came to her. "My interest was inspired by studying-
by myself and motivated by myself-math for the entrance
exam to Hunter High," she says.
At Hunter, she did so well in math and science that a poem
in Dresselhaus's senior yearbook pays tribute to her abilities: "Any equation she can solve / Every problem she can
resolve / Mildred equals brains plus fun / In math and science, she's second to none." She went on to study at Hunter
College, where, during her second year, another important
force entered into her life.
"Rosalyn Yalow's [physics] course got me more into focusing
on the science profession," Dresselhaus says of the course she
loved most at Hunter, which was taught by a medical physicist
who would soon herself decamp for a research career and
ultimately share the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. "That's where I really got started. And Rosalyn insisted
that I go to graduate school. She was a person who used to
tell you what you were doing."
Bolstered by Yalow's effusive letters of recommendation,
Dresselhaus was admitted to Radcliffe College in 1951 for
graduate studies, an admission deferred so that she could
attend the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright fellowship.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum May, 2015