ABOVE: © The Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation
When Hadiyah-Nicole Green was in kindergarten, she started helping one of her older brothers with his fourth-grade homework. She and her siblings lived in Saint Louis, Missouri, with their aunt and uncle, who raised them after their mother and grandparents died. “As a child, there were no scientists in my life. I didn’t dream of being a scientist, let alone a physicist. I didn’t have that example,” Green tells The Scientist. “But I loved learning . . . and that gave me the foundation that I needed.”
For college, Green chose to attend Alabama A&M University, where a graduate student persuaded her to study physics. In the summers, she interned at the University of Rochester and then at NASA, where she helped calibrate lasers for the International Space Station. After graduating in 2003 with a perfect 4.0 GPA, she planned to ...
