partnership. Bouchet ranked sixth in his class on graduation from Yale. Bouchet's doctoral thesis centered on measuring the refractive indices of various glasses. Professional life Earning his PhD, Bouchet was unable to find a university teaching or research facility position due to racial discrimination. He moved to Philadelphia in 1876 and took a position at the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), where he taught physics and chemistry for the next 26 years. He resigned in 1902 at the height of the W. E. B. Du Bois-Booker T. Washington controversy over the need for an industrial vs. collegiate education for black people. Bouchet spent the next 14 years holding a variety of jobs around the country. Between 1905 and 1908, he was director of academics at St. Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia (presently, St. Paul's College). He was then principal and teacher at Lincoln High School in Gallipolis, Ohio, from 1908 to 1913, when arteriosclerosis forced him to retire. Death Upon retirement, Bouchet moved back to New Haven. He died there in his childhood home at 94 Bradley Street in 1918 after a six-week illness caused by high blood pressure. He never married and had no children. He was buried in an unmarked grave at New Haven's Evergreen Cemetery. In 1998, Yale University placed a headstone on Bouchet's grave. Legacy The American Physical Society (APS Physics) confers the Edward A. Bouchet Award on some of the nation's outstanding physicists for their contribution to physics. The Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute (EBASI) was founded in 1988 by the late Nobel Laureate, Professor Abdus Salam, under the direction of the founding chairman Charles S. Brown. The current chair of EBASI is Professor Milton Dean Slaughter. In 2005, Yale and Howard University founded the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in his name. Notes References 1852 births 1918 deaths Scientists from New Haven, Connecticut Yale University alumni Hopkins School alumni Science teachers American physicists African-American scientists Connecticut Republicans 20th-century African-American people African-American physicists