Bettye Washington Greene

Bettye Washington Greene (March 20, 1935 – June 16, 1995) was the first African American female Ph.D. chemist to work in a professional position at the Dow Chemical Company. At Dow, she researched latex and polymers.

Bettye Washington was born in Fort Worth, Texas. She attended segregated public schools and graduated from I.M. Terrell High School around 1952.

She entered Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, graduating with a B.S. in chemistry in 1955. Following her marriage to Veteran Airforce Captain William Miller Greene in 1955, she attended Wayne State University in Detroit, where she earned her Ph.D. in physical chemistry working with Wilfred Heller. Her doctoral dissertation, "Determination of particle size distributions in emulsions by light scattering" was published in 1965.

She was elected to Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

Dow Chemical

In 1965, Greene joined the Dow Chemical Company's E. C. Britton Research Laboratory in Midland, Michigan.She was the first African-American woman to join the company in a professional position.At Dow, she researched colloid and latex chemistry, including interactions between latex and paper.

In 1970, she was promoted to senior research chemist at Dow Chemical. In 1973, she joined Dow Chemical's Designed Polymers Research Division, again working with latex, to find polymers that could improve latex.She continued to work for Dow Chemical until the late 1980s.

Greene was a charter member of the Midland, Michigan Alumni Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority,a national public service group emphasizing work with African American women.The Midland chapter was chartered in 1984.

Greene held a number of patents, including:

• 4968740: Latex-based adhesive prepared by emulsion polymerization
• 4609434: Composite sheet prepared with stable latexes containing phosphorus surface groups
• 4506057: Stable latexes containing phosphorus surface groups