Ellen Henrietta (Swallow) Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 1800s, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.