IEEE Spectrum May, 2015 - 53

"Radcliffe had no [science] classes," Dresselhaus explains.
"The classes were at Harvard. But the exams were at Radcliffe.
Women didn't take their exams with the men. I had to take
my exams by myself in a different room. It was a very complex situation and not a very comfortable one."
During her first year at Harvard, Dresselhaus realized she
was growing weary of the university and a bit restless. She'd
discovered that the best place in the country to study physics
was at the University of Chicago, home to Manhattan Project
veteran and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. So in 1953, after finishing her master's degree at Radcliffe, she was off to Illinois.

At Chicago, too, Dresselhaus was often the only woman in her classes.
But the learning environment wasn't as stifling. And it was
at Chicago, she says, where she first really began to learn to
think like a physicist, thanks to Fermi himself. Although by
then famous for his role in the Manhattan Project, Fermi
headed up a small and intimate physics department. In
Dresselhaus's incoming class in 1953, for instance, there
were just 11 physics students.
Fermi was an early riser, as was Dresselhaus, and they lived
along the same walking route to campus. So she, along with
other students, faculty, and acolytes, timed their morning commute so they could stroll along with the legendary physicist.
photograph by

Mike McGregor

"He was a methodical guy; he always did the same
thing every day," Dresselhaus says. On the morning walks, for example, Fermi would talk about
the issues on his mind-sometimes related to the
day's lecture, sometimes not. And when Fermi
gave his talks, he'd first hand the class copies of his
notes. "He didn't want people taking notes while
he [lectured]. He wanted people to listen. He'd give
you the notes. The lecture [notes] didn't have many
pages. Very concise."
Fermi, who died in November 1954, during Dresselhaus's second year at Chicago, still had an outsized influence on the young woman during her brief
time in his orbit. "He developed in me the mind-set
that we should be interested in everything," she
says, "because we never know where the next big
breakthrough in science will occur."
In the fall of 1955, Dresselhaus began her Ph.D.
project, investigating the microwave properties of
a superconductor in a magnetic field. The novel and
hybrid nature of her investigation-involving lowtemperature and solid-state physics, electrical engineering, and materials science-meant she couldn't
just order the parts for her research out of a catalog.
She found much of what she needed, though,
under the university's football stands, where more
than a dozen years before, Fermi had led a group
that had created the world's first man-made nuclearfission chain reaction. There, a mountain of surplus
equipment was free for the taking. Repurposing a
warehouse worth of materials, she grew superconducting
wire for her experiments, built microwave equipment, and
even produced liquid helium.
Dresselhaus says she'd developed that kind of gumption
because her primary school teachers were terrible. "They
were sufficiently bad that if you wanted to learn something,
you taught yourself," she says. "That was terrific training."
While at Chicago, she met her future husband, fellow graduate student Gene Dresselhaus. They married in May 1958
and moved to Ithaca, N.Y., where she was a National Science
Foundation postdoctoral fellow and Gene had an entry-level
faculty position in the physics department at Cornell University. There Dresselhaus also met another celebrity scientist,
albeit one whose great fame would come years later-Richard
Feynman. At the time, Feynman was developing the equations
that would become the quantum theory of electrodynamics.
"He gave a lecture now and then," she says. "And if there's
a Feynman lecture, you go to it. It's always interesting, looking at things you've heard about before but from a totally different perspective."
Also in 1959, the Dresselhauses welcomed their first child,
Marianne. And despite the stimulating Feynman lectures
Dresselhaus occasionally attended, Cornell wasn't exactly a
female academic's dream in those days. Early on, a faculty

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