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St. Elmo Brady, born on December 22, 1884 in Louisville, Kentucky, was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry.
When he was twenty years old, Brady moved to Nashville, Tennessee in order to attend Fisk University. Here he encountered chemistry professor Thomas W. Talley, whom one can speculate was a role model for Brady. When he graduated from Fisk in 1908, he obtained a position at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama where he taught until 1913.
In 1914 Brady earned an M.A. in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He remained there to continue his work on the relationship between acid strength and structure of organic acids. His research advisor was Dr. Clarence G. Derick. Brady obtained his Ph.D. in 1916, whereupon he went back to teach at the Tuskegee Institute.
After four years at Tuskegee, Brady accepted a position as head of the chemistry department at Howard University in Washington, DC. Seven years later, in 1927, he returned to Fisk University as chair of the chemistry department, where he stayed until his retirement in 1952. At Fisk, he carried out research on the chemical composition of magnolia seeds and castor beans. He also began the first graduate chemistry program at a black college. In honor of Thomas W. Talley, Brady instituted a lecture series that enabled Fisk to invite well-known chemists to come and share their research with the faculty.
After his retirement, Brady moved to Washington, DC, where he lived until his death on December 25, 1966.
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