Education

B.S. (1968) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ph.D. Physics (1973) Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Accolades:

National Medal of Science

CIBA-GEIGY Exceptional Black Scientist

Head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Co-chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board

President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

President of American Association for the Advancement of Science

This is scientist is most known for…

Conducting research that laid the groundwork for inventions such as fiber optic cables, solar cells, touch-tone telephones, the portable fax, and others. She if one of the most preeminent figures in the science of semiconductors and their optical, electronic, magnetic and transport properties, semiconductor quantum-wells and superlattices.

She is the first Black woman to have received a PhD from MIT.

Background and early life:

Shirley Ann Jackson was born in 1946 in Washington, DC. She attended Roosevelt High School, and graduated as a valedictorian.

At MIT, she founded the Black Student Union and advocated for the admission of more Black students by the institution. When she got there, there were only two Black students enrolled. After only one year, the number rose to 57. During her time as an undergraduate, she also volunteered at the Boston City Hospital and tutored students at the Roxbury YMCA. She wrote her senior thesis on solid-state physics, which at that time was a prolific field. This laid the basis for her subsequent work in semiconductor systems.

Her doctoral work revolved around particle theory. Her PhD advisor at MIT was James Young, the first African American tenured full professor in MIT's physics department. Jackson's thesis, "The Study of a Multiperipheral Model with Continued Cross-Channel Unitarity," was subsequently published in the Annals of Physics in 1975.

As a post-doc, she remained interested in subatomic particles, and quickly became a researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois (known as Fermilab) where she studied hadrons--medium to large subatomic particles that include baryons and mesons. She went on to work at CERN, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Aspen Center for Physics.

In recent years, Jackson also worked in policy concerning cybersecurity, both on national and global scales, and digital technology. President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Science in 2016.

Barriers broken by this scientist:

She is the first Black woman to have ever received a PhD from MIT. Not only did she conduct pioneering research, but she did so during a time when people of color and women were still facing high levels of discrimination and lack of recognition in STEM.

https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/about/meet-our-guests/shirley-jackson

https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/shirley-ann-jackson/

¹‘Shirley Jackson - Physicist of the African Diaspora’, accessed 19 July 2021, http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/physics/jackson_shirleya.html.

Edited by

Teodor Grosu