Radcliffe College. She received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1958 where she studied under Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. She then spent two years at Cornell University as a postdoc before moving to Lincoln Lab as a staff member. Career and legacy Dresselhaus had a 57-year career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She became the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Visiting Professor of electrical engineering at MIT in 1967, became a tenured faculty member in 1968, and became a professor of physics in 1983. In 1985, she was appointed the first female Institute Professor at MIT As the exotic compounds she studied became increasingly relevant to modern science and engineering, she was uniquely positioned to become a world-leading expert and write one of the standard textbooks. Her groundwork in the field led to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolating and characterizing graphene, for which they were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize. Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1990 in recognition of her work on electronic properties of materials as well as expanding the opportunities of women in science and engineering. In 2005 she was awarded the 11th Annual Heinz Award in the category of Technology, the Economy and Employment. In 2008, she was awarded the Oersted Medal. In 2012, she was co-recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award, along with Burton Richter, and was awarded the Kavli Prize "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures." In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. In 2015, she received the IEEE Medal of Honor. In 2000–2001, she was the director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. From 2003 to 2008, she was the chair of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics. She also has served as president of the American Physical Society (APS), the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences. Her former students include such notable materials scientists as Deborah Chung and physicists as Nai-Chang Yeh and Greg Timp. There are several physical theories named after Dresselhaus. The Hicks-Dresselhaus Model (L. D. Hicks and Dresselhaus) is the first basic model for low-dimensional thermoelectrics, which initiated the whole band field. The SFDD model (Riichiro