Born on this date in 1923 in the Pittsburgh suburb of New Kensington, Stephanie Louise Kwolek (Wikipedia) graduated from what is now known as Carnegie Mellon University in 1946. She would go on, starting in 1964, to discover the remarkable properties of paraphenylene terephtalamide polymers, research which would culminate in 1971 with the advent of Kevlar (Wikipedia), an entirely new field of polymer chemistry, and the countless remarkable applications thereof we now enjoy. Today Dr. Kwolek is 87. Happy Birthday!
