Famous as the first female and African American Chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, this prominent physicist also served as President of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Over the course of her distinguished career, she worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories and taught at Rutgers University. After earning her bachelor's degree in theoretical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she became the first African American, female doctoral graduate of the same institution. Early in her career, she was a researcher at Illinois' Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.