Rajeshwari Chatterjee (24 January 1922 – 3 September 2010) was an Indian scientist and an academic. She was the first woman engineer from Karnataka. During her tenure at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, Chatterjee was a professor and later chairperson of the department of Electrical Communication Engineering. Early life and education Chatterjee was born in 1922 in Karnataka. She had her primary education in a "special English school" founded by her grandmother, Kamalamma Dasappa, one of the first women graduates from Mysore and who was very active in the field of education especially those of widows and deserted wives. After her school finals, she was tempted to take up History but eventually chose physics and mathematics. She studied in Central College of Bangalore and earned B.Sc. (Hons) and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics. In both these exams she ranked first in the Mysore University. She received Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar Award and M.T. Narayana Iyengar Prize and the Walters Memorial Prize respectively for her performances in the B.Sc. and M.Sc. examinations. In 1943, after her M.Sc., she joined the Indian Institute of Science(IISc), Bangalore as a Research Student in the then Electrical Technology Department in the area of Communication. She went to C.V. Raman to work under him. Some sources say that Raman refused to take her stating that Rajeshwari had no degrees in physics while others say that he was averse to the idea of having women students. After the Second World War, an interim government was set up in India to transfer power from the British to Indians, which offered scholarships to bright young scientists to study abroad. She applied for one such scholarship in the field of electronics and its applications, and in 1946, she was selected as a "bright student" by the Government of Delhi and was given a scholarship to go abroad to pursue higher studies and she chose to study in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the United States. In the 1950s it was very difficult for Indian women to go abroad to pursue higher education. But Chatterjee was determined to do so. In July 1947, one month before India's independence, she started her journey to the USA on a converted troop ship SS Marine Adder and reached there after 30 days. In the US, she was admitted to the University of Michigan and obtained her master's degree from the Department of Electrical