Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Huffington Post | June 27, 2015
Q&A with 63rd Black Female PhD in Physics
Huffington Post Q&A with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, the 63rd black woman in American history with a PhD in physics:
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a 32-year-old theoretical astrophysicist. Her academic home is arguably the nation’s most elite physics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In one sense, she is among a dying breed. Prescod-Weinstein is a pen-and-paper theorist. “Basically I do calculus all day, on paper,” she told HuffPost. “I’m a little bit of a hold-out. There are things I could be doing by computer that I just like to do by hand.”
But she is also part of a vanguard, a small but growing number of African-American women with doctorates in physics.
Just 83 Black women have received a Ph.D. in physics-related fields in American history, according to a database maintained by physicists Dr. Jami Valentine and Jessica Tucker that was updated last week.