Meet The 102 yr Old Grandma Who Just Bagged A Doctorate Degree Today | Photo

A 102-year-old German woman will become the world’s oldest person to be awarded a doctorate on Tuesday, almost 80 years after the Nazis prevented her from sitting her final exam.

Ingeborg Rapoport was 25 when she wrote her doctoral thesis, but she had to wait until now to defend it before an academic committee—77 years later.

Ms. Rapoport, a 102-year-old retired neonatologist who lives in Berlin, submitted her thesis to the University of Hamburg in 1938, five years after Adolf Hitler took power. Her topic was diphtheria, an infectious disease that was then a leading cause of death among children in the U.S. and Europe.

But because of Nazi oppression she has had to wait almost eight decades before being awarded her PhD.