An element is a chemical substance made up of a particular kind of atom and hence cannot be broken down or transformed by a chemical reaction into a different element, though it can be transmuted into another element through a nuclear reaction.
Almost 40 years separate Shirley Ann Jackson's achievement, as the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jedidah Isler, the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale.
Patricia Bath graduated with a baccalaureate degree from Hunter College in 1964, then from Howard University School of Medicine in 1968. She was the first female ophthalmologist at UCLA's prestigious Jules Stein Eye Institute and the first female African American surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center in 1974.