Stephanie Kwolek
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| Born | Stephanie Louise Kwolek July 31, 1923 New Kensington, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | June 18, 2014 (aged 90) Wilmington, Delaware United States |
| Residence | Wilmington, Delaware |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Organic chemistry |
| Institutions | DuPont |
| Alma mater | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Known for | Kevlar |
| Notable awards | DuPont company's Lavoisier Medal (1995) National Medal of Technology Perkin Medal (1997) Howard N. Potts Medal |
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 Stephanie Kwolek, "I don't think there's anything like saving someone's life to bring you satisfaction and happiness", "Women in Chemistry", Chemical Heritage Foundation
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Stephanie Louise Kwolek (July 31, 1923 – June 18, 2014) was an American chemist, whose career at the DuPont company spanned over forty years. She is best known for inventing the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness: poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide—better known as Kevlar. For her discovery, Kwolek was awarded the DuPont company's Lavoisier Medal for outstanding technical achievement. As of February 2015, she was the only female employee to have received that honor. In 1995 she became the fourth woman to be added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Kwolek won numerous awards for her work in polymer chemistry, including the National Medal of Technology, the IRI Achievement Award and the Perkin Medal.
Kwolek was born to Polish immigrant parents in the Pittsburgh suburb of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, in 1923. Her father, John Kwolek (Polish: Jan Chwałek), died when she was ten years old. He was a naturalist by avocation, and Kwolek spent hours with him, as a child, exploring the natural world. She attributed her interest in science to him and an interest in fashion to her mother, Nellie (Zajdel) Kwolek.
In 1946, Kwolek earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in chemistry from Margaret Morrison Carnegie College of Carnegie Mellon University. She had planned to become a doctor and hoped she could earn enough money from a temporary job in a chemistry-related field to attend medical school.
In 1946, Hale Charch, a future mentor to Kwolek, offered her a position at DuPont's Buffalo, New York, facility. Charch had initially told Kwolek that he would contact her within two weeks, but after Kwolek said she had to answer another job offer and insisted on a faster reply, Charch immediately offered her the position. She reportedly got her job because of the amount of men that were overseas at the time for World War II. She only kept her job after the war because of her extensive research on polymers. While Kwolek initially only intended to work for DuPont temporarily, she found the work interesting and decided to stay rather than pursuing a medical career, moving to Wilmington, Delaware, in 1950 to continue to work for DuPont. After about nine years with the company, she created Kevlar. In 1959, she won the first of many awards, a publication award from the American Chemical Society (ACS). The paper, The Nylon Rope Trick, demonstrated a way of producing nylon in a beaker at room temperature. It is still the basis of a common classroom experiment.
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