There, her predilections were clear: “In math and science,” the yearbook declared, Mildred Spiewak is “second to none.”<br />After graduating she enrolled at Hunter College, where she intended to become a schoolteacher until she took an elementary<br />physics class with Rosalyn Yalow, a future Nobel laureate, who urged her to consider a career in science.<br />Nicknamed the Queen of Carbon in scientific circles, Dr. Dresselhaus was renowned for her efforts to promote the cause of women in science.<br />Mildred Dresselhaus, a professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research into the fundamental properties of carbon helped transform it into the superstar of modern materials science<br />and the nanotechnology industry, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass.<br />“I met Millie on my interview for a faculty job in 1984,” said Lorna Gibson, now a professor of materials science and engineering.<br />“Every morning she’d leave the house at 5:30, the first car in the parking lot every day,<br />and everyone she collaborated with she viewed as family,” said Ms. Cooper, Dr. Dresselhaus’s granddaughter, who is a graduate student at M. I.T.<br />“What if Millie Dresselhaus were as famous as any celebrity?”<br />For its part, carbon is as capricious as any celebrity.<br />Dr. Dresselhaus was a pioneer in research on fullerenes, also called buckyballs: soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon atoms<br />that can be used as drug delivery devices, lubricants, filters and catalysts.
