Stephanie Kwolek was an American chemist who is most famous for her invention of Kevlar, a material often used in bulletproof vests. She was born in New Kensington, PA, just northeast of Pittsburgh, where she was raised by her widowed mother along with her brother. In 1946 she received a degree from Carnegie Mellon University in chemistry. Shortly thereafter, she got a job with the DuPont Company as a lab chemist in snowy Buffalo, New York. She worked in the rayon department, a fast-growing field that caused her to later move to Wilmington, Delaware with the company’s Pioneering Research Laboratory. While there, she developed a famous fabric that would end up saving countless lives. That fabric was Kevlar. This invention came about because
