She's the 63rd Black Female PhD in Physics in US History

Dr. 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.

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So begins the article by Nico Pitney about this spectacular young woman.

It's a lengthy one, but well worth the time to discover this phenomenal woman.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/chanda-prescod-weinstein_n_7574020.html

Another excerpt - 

I want to ask about your experience in higher education. You've studied and researched at a variety of schools. Looking back, would you have handled your own education differently in any way?

My husband likes to ask me this question periodically. [Laughter] I think because I have a tendency to be very critical of how higher education is delivered, particularly in STEM, and particularly to people from marginalized communities. This is something that I think about a lot. I think if I had to go back in time, I would maybe have younger Chanda apply to some HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). 

In particular, Spelman does a phenomenal job producing Black women who go on to Ph.D.'s in STEM. They're not given a lot of credit for that. They don't get awards for it. You don't hear President Obama coming and giving commencement speeches and thanking them for their service to the country—which it really is a service they provide—but they're one of the top three producers of Blacks who go on to Ph.D.'s in STEM.

Going to an HBCU can be a different experience for Black students. What I've read is that Black students come out of HBCUs with higher levels of self-confidence than ones who go to predominately white institutions. So when I'm talking to Black high school students who are interested in going on to do STEM, that is something that I tell them about, that there are some significant advantages to going to HBCUs. I believe one third of the physics majors in the United States who are Black are produced by HBCUs. That's actually fairly recent, it used to be over half of them were. That's actually a change that's just happened in the last 10 years.

So they really are providing a service to the country that I think goes unrecognized. I needed a full ride to college, so when I was applying to college, I applied to twelve schools. I got into all of them. Five of them were University of California campuses. I couldn't afford any of the public universities that I got into. I could only afford Harvard College, the California Institute of Technology, and Carlton College. Of the three, Harvard seemed like the best choice for a Black student in terms of access, being part of Black student community and being in an urban area. So that ended up being the major determining factor for me.