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.

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.

By comparison, the physics programs at MIT and UC Berkeley alone grant nearly as many Ph.D.'s each year. In total, U.S. universities awarded over 1,700 physics Ph.D.'s in 2013. The number of African-American faculty at U.S. physics departments remains similarly low; only two percent are Black, according to a report issued last year by the American Institute of Physics, and half of those faculty members are employed by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Yet more than a third of all African-American women with physics doctorates earned them in the last 10 years, according to the database. In February, Prescod-Weinstein (citing subsequently-revised figures) posted a celebratory message on Twitter:


"How did I feel when I posted that?" she said during a recent interview. "You know, whenever I think about these numbers—and I guess this makes me some white supremacist stereotype or whatever—I feel angry. I feel really, really angry. When I started as a physics major, I understood that I would be some kind of barrier-breaker, but I didn't really understand what that was going to feel like, or how hard it would be and how upsetting it would be, and how difficult it would be to watch other people go through the same process. So I think I felt angry; I felt like people need to hear this. People need to know this."

Prescod-Weinstein recounts teaching herself calculus and physics when her high school ran out of classes at her level; she grew up reading the New York Times each morning on the school bus, and spent a year carrying around the complete works of William Shakespeare. She identifies as queer/agender, and has written about the collapse of her first marriage "under the pressure of many things, including my wife's family's homophobia."

Prescod-Weinstein's parents were both political activists, and she has followed their path. Most of her public social media posts focus on social justice, in the world of science and beyond. She has highlighted the professional challenges of investing her time in activism:

For my part, as a Black woman, I would ask my white (and male) peers to remember that many of us (though not all) experience our differences as a negative in this environment. Where I see it as a Black cultural tradition to lend a helping hand even as I continue to achieve my own dreams, others see my commitment to [the National Society of Black Physicists] as a signal that I am wasting my time not doing science. Do my friends who play music in their spare time get this same signal? Moreover, many of us who are women or people of color or both are often involved in efforts to change the face of science. When we are challenged about that by our peers, not only are they standing in our way, but they are also failing to recognize that for many of us, this investment in the community is necessary to our survival, much like someone else might say playing music is for theirs.


We spoke to Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for Sophia, a HuffPost project to collect life lessons from fascinating people. She shared insights about her early life and influences, the challenges faced by marginalized communities in science, how she finds personal fulfillment and what she'd do differently if she had the chance.

How did your early life experiences lead you to this point?

The first thing that comes to mind: I was raised by a single mom. That had a really big impact on how I see myself in relation to the community. I do a lot of activism in terms of creating equal opportunities in the scientific community and more broadly. My mom was singlehandedly the strongest influence in terms of understanding the sacrifices people make for those that they love and for the communities that they cherish.

My mom—to be honest, she couldn't really help me with my homework after maybe the fourth grade. A lot of that had to do with her own experience of getting an education as a new immigrant to the United States. As a Black Caribbean immigrant, she was treated pretty badly at her school when she first came to the U.S., and I think came out of it educated to believe that she couldn't really do math.

She likes to joke about it now—and she's clearly one of the smartest people that I've ever met. But she did not let that stop her from recognizing that I had a strong interest in math at a very young age. When that translated into an interest in science, when I was about ten years old, she didn't feel threatened by it, and instead encouraged it.

That's played a huge role in how I think about mentoring now, even as a post-doctoral fellow, because I'm the only Black woman in the physics department at MIT. Black students come and talk to me because there just aren't faculty for them to talk to.



I got exposed to science in a serious way for the first time when I was 10 at school in fifth grade. It became obvious really quickly that I was really excited about it. My mom read in the newspaper that a documentary about Stephen Hawking was going to be showing. She thought it was interesting, and she really thought I should see it. I complained the whole way because it was a Saturday morning and independent movies seem really ridiculous to 10-year-olds. I thought it was super uncool. What was this "A Brief History of Time"? I didn't want to see some ridiculous thing about time.

My mom, being the strong-willed person that she is, dragged me into the theater, and halfway through the documentary they were talking about singularities and black holes, and how the singularity probably wasn't a physical thing but was in fact a breakdown of Einstein's General Relativity, just a point at which we did not have a theory for this science.

I was like, "Whoa. There's something that Einstein didn't understand? There's something Einstein didn't figure out?" I couldn't believe it. I said, "I want to work on that problem. I want to understand where that came from." So I came out of the movie theater begging my mom to buy me a copy of the book.

I was like, "Buy me 'A Brief History of Time'; I want to read it." My mom was really anxious that I wouldn't understand it, and would get discouraged because of that, so she wouldn't buy it for me. We didn't have a lot of money, so for her actually buying a book like that would have been a major expense. So my uncle—my mom's older brother—bought it for me behind her back for my eleventh birthday.

I walked out of that movie theater and I was like, "I'm going to be whatever that guy is." I looked up Stephen Hawking and sent an email to his address. Presumably one of his graduate students responded to me and explained to me how you become a theoretical physicist. So I began planning. I'm going to go to Harvard for college. I'm going to go to Cal Tech—those were my top two choices—and I'm going to get a Ph.D., and I'm going to become a theoretical physicist. And that's basically how it played out.

Every time I stumbled academically from then on, my mom kind of gave me a little shove and said, "This is what you want to do, so keep going."

It's fairly rare for people to identify their passion so early in life. Why do you think that happened in your case?

I think there's almost certainly an element of genetics involved. I tend to be someone who runs on passion. I think people who run on passion often find things they're passionate about early on. So for example, I was not the valedictorian of my high school class because I couldn't be bothered to take AP courses that I didn't care about. I either care, or I don't care.

I was also lucky. I was born to a parent who speaks English, who has a college degree. She was able to fight for me at my school at various points. She understood the school system well enough to navigate getting me into magnet schools, so I was entirely educated in the LA Unified School District Magnet System.

All of those things add up to me getting the opportunity to be exposed in the first place at an early age, which is something that I think about a lot. And since my parent spoke English, she had access to a lot of the media resources that people can get locked out of in a society that focuses on English as a primary language of discourse. So I think that some of it is personality, and some of it is just sheer luck of being born to the right mom.

On my mom's side of the family, for generations people have been teachers. My uncle was a teacher, and thought about things in terms of encouraging me and pedagogy. I think that's why he bought me the book. I do also think that that's part of it. If a kid never has the opportunity to get exposed to science, how are they going to get excited about it, right?

Awe inspiring