Dr. Marie Maynard Daly was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry.
Daly was brought up in a family that valued education, her father had emigrated from the West Indies and enrolled at Cornell University to study chemistry, unfortunately he had to drop out due to a lack of money. Daly attended Queens College in Flushing, New York, she then utilised a combination of a job as a lab assistant and a hard earned fellowship to enable her to complete her graduate degree at New York University.
In 1944, she enrolled at Columbia University as a doctoral student, the timing of her enrolment helped her as World War II meant that employers were actively looking to employ women to fill the jobs that the men who had been sent to war had left behind. Columbia’s chemistry program was led by Dr. Mary L. Caldwell, a woman who worked to blaze new trails for women in Chemistry during her career. In 1947 she became the first black woman to earn a Ph.D in Chemistry.
Daly returned to Columbia University where she worked closely with Dr. Quentin B. Deming on the causes of heart attacks. Their work later moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University where she examined how proteins are constructed in the body and discovered the relationship between high cholesterol and clogged arteries. This lead to a new understanding of how foods and diet can affect the health of the heart and the circulatory system.
Daly taught biochemistry courses at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University where she strived to get students of color enrolled in medical schools and graduate science programs. In 1988 she started a scholarship in honor of her father for minority students who want to study science at Queens College. She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and designated a career scientist by the Health Research Council of the City of New York.