On this date in 1982, physicist and feminist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was born in Los Angeles. She was raised primarily by her mother, Margaret Prescod, who immigrated from Barbados as a teen and co-founded International Black Women for Wages for Housework in 1974 and later hosted and produced Sojourners in Los Angeles. Sam Weinstein, her father, worked for the gas company and as a labor organizer with European Jewish descent. Her parents separated when she was 5.
When she was 10, she went with her mother to see the Errol Morris documentary “A Brief History of Time” about Stephen Hawking, whose book had the same title. She begged her mom to buy the book but “she was worried it would be too hard and discouraged me. Her brother, my Uncle Peter, bought it for me as an 11th birthday gift a few months later. After that, I looked Stephen Hawking up and emailed him to ask how to become a theoretical physicist. One of his grad students responded.” (Black Perspectives, Aug. 29, 2016)
She lists Hawking’s 1988 work as the popular science book that influenced her most, along with “Cosmos” (1980) by Carl Sagan. “Prescod-Weinstein recalls teaching herself calculus and physics when her high school ran out of classes at her level; she grew up reading the New York Times each morning on the school bus and spent a year carrying around the complete works of William Shakespeare.” (Huffington Post, Dec. 7, 2017)
She earned a B.S. in physics, astrophysics and astronomy in 2003 from Harvard University, followed by a master’s in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2005 and a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Cosmic Acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology” in 2010. “I am a Star Trek fanatic. I believe in the Vulcan philosophy of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’ even as I rail against what I call the diversity-and-inclusion racket here on Earth. … I believe the Universe is always more amazing than we think it is. Because science is a human endeavor, I am constantly working to ensure that everyone has an equitable opportunity to participate.” (Germantown Jewish Centre, undated)
She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Observational Cosmology Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, then worked as as a physics research associate at the University of Washington before joining the physics, women’s and gender studies program at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, gaining tenure in 2023.
She is a rare bird academically, writing in 2017: “In 2010, I became the 69th Black American woman to get a PhD in physics. As of next Weds there will be 78 of us. #BlackWomenAppreciationDay”
What does her work involve? Her “keywords” on her curriculum vitae are cosmology, particle physics, axions, inflation, dark matter, quantum field theory, general relativity, neutron stars. Her website further describes it:
“I have a secondary area of expertise in an area of thought that I call Black Feminist Science, Technology, and Society Studies. … In relation, I maintain a Decolonising Science Reading List. Drawing from sociology of science, philosophy of science, Black studies, Black/queer feminist thought, and science and society studies, I illuminate how social phenomena shape knowledge outcomes in physics.”
Prescod-Weinstein identifies as “queer/agender” and has written about the collapse of her first marriage “under the pressure of many things, including my wife’s family’s homophobia.” (Ibid., Huffington Post) Her second marriage was to a Jewish Taiwanese-American who practices law.
“I’m ethnically Ashkenazi Jewish, so I come to it not as a belief system but as an identity I was born to. Jewishness isn’t just a religion, it’s also a series of cultural and ethnic identities,” Prescod-Weinstein writes: “In Reconstructionist Judaism, the branch I practice in, G-d is not necessarily a supernatural presence, but rather a concept that holds space for how we spiritually connect with our sense of what the universe is about, what life is about. For me, Jewish texts are an important ethical guide, something to think with.” (Clark University News, Sept. 28, 2023)
PHOTO: Courtesy of Prescod-Weinstein
