Georgia Institute of Technology

and became the largest engineering institute in the South and the third largest in the US. The first Ph.D. was awarded in 1950 in electrical engineering. Van Leer also admitted the first female students to regular classes in 1952 and began steps toward integration. He stood up to Georgia governor Marvin Griffin's demand to bar Bobby Grier from participating in the 1956 Sugar Bowl game between Georgia Tech and Grier's University of Pittsburgh. After Van Leer's death, his wife Ella Lillian Wall Van Leer bought a house on campus and opened it to female students to support their success. She also set up the first sorority on campus along with a Society of Women Engineers chapter. In 1968 women could enroll in all programs at Tech. Industrial Management was the last program to open to women. The first women's dorm, Fulmer Hall, opened in 1969. Rena Faye Smith, appointed as a research assistant in the School of Physics in 1969 by Dr. Ray Young, in X-Ray Diffraction, became the first female faculty member (research) …