She moved from New York to New England for graduate studies, earning a PhD in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1925.

[3] She then moved to Princeton University, where she worked with Karl Taylor Compton with support from a National Research Council fellowship.

However, her marriage — to fellow physicist J. Alston Clark — broke apart, and her health worsened, forcing her to take medical leave.

During her absence, Bryn Mawr replaced her as chair with a male physics professor (Walter C. Michels), and Dewey was unemployed until 1940, when she found a part-time instructor position at Hunter College.

[4] In a landmark paper while at United States Rubber Company, Dewey derived the elastic constants of a solid material filled with non-rigid particles.

"[8] Mackenzie's solution may be considered a special case of the more general and difficult problem that Dewey set herself and succeeded in solving exactly.