Mildred S Dresselhaus is an Institute Professor and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dresselhaus received her undergraduate degree at Hunter College in New York, and carried out postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright Fellowship and Harvard University. She received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1958. She then spent two years at Cornell University before moving to MIT, working in the Solid State Physics Division. She was named an Institute Professor in 1985.

In 2000-2001, she was the Director of the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. As of 2004, she is the Chair of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics.

She is particularly noted for her work in graphite and carbon nanotubes.