Crosspost: Fewer than 20 Black women physicists in the U.S. have earned tenure. This scholar just joined the club

By Nadra Nittle for The 19th

Credit: University of New Hampshire

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein still remembers how appalled her father was when she pointed to a stream of light spanning the sky and inquired, “What is that?”

“My dad just looked at me like, ‘What. . . is wrong with you?’” Prescod-Weinstein recalled with a laugh. “That’s the Milky Way,” he told her.

Neither one of them knew for sure during their camping trip among the giant sequoias nearly three decades ago that Prescod-Weinstein, then 14, would grow up to be a theoretical physicist specializing in early universe cosmology, though the teenager had already expressed an interest in the field. Spending her youth in light-polluted Los Angeles, however, had robbed Prescod-Weinstein of the opportunity to study the night sky, so it took driving hours out of the city to finally see the Milky Way.

Today, the teen who didn’t recognize her own galaxy is not only an expert on the cosmos but also a trailblazing scholar.

Read more at

https://19thnews.org/2023/07/chanda-prescod-weinstein-physicist-tenure-rare-feat/