Mary Elliott Hill

Mary Elliott Hill (January 5, 1907 – February 12, 1969) was one of the earliest African-American women to become a chemist. She was known as both an organic and analytical chemist. Hill worked on the properties of ultraviolet light, developing analytic methodology, and, in collaboration with her husband Carl McClellan Hill, developing ketene synthesis which supported the development of plastics. Hill also undertook graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania in the summers, awarded the first master's degree in chemistry to an African-American woman in 1941.

She taught at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, for one year before she was appointed an assistant professor of chemistry at Tennessee A & I State College, a historically black college now known as Tennessee State University. She was a professor of chemistry at Tennessee A & I State College from 1944 to 1962, and was the acting head of the chemistry department from 1951 to 1962. Mary Hill followed her husband to Kentucky State and was appointed a professor of chemistry. Mary Hill developed the analytical methods for the work, and specialized using monomeric ketenes. Her methods were used to determine the solubility of different components in non-aqueous solutions, which enabled synthetic chemists in their group to identify, isolate, and quantify products. The first, General College Chemistry (1944), was written in conjunction with her husband Carl Hill and with Myron B. Towns. The laboratory manual Experiments in Organic Chemistry (1954) was made into four editions. suggesting that their marriage occurred somewhere between 1925 and 1927. The couple had three children.