The HistoryMakers

Physicist Shirley Ann Jackson was born on August 5, 1946 in Washington, D.C. to George Hiter Jackson and Beatrice Cosby Jackson. When Jackson was a child, her mother would read her the biography of Benjamin Banneker, an African American scientist and mathematician who helped build Washington, D.C., and her father encouraged her interest in science by assisting her with projects for school. The "Space Race" of the late-1950s would also have an impact on Jackson as a child, spurring her interest in scientific investigation.

Jackson attended Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C., where she took accelerated math and science classes. She graduated as valedictorian in 1964, and, encouraged by the assistant principal for boys at her high school, Jackson applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was among the first African American students to attend the school, and in her undergraduate class she was one of only two women.

In 1973, Jackson graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in MIT's history. She worked on her thesis, entitled "The Study of a Multiperpiheral Model with Continued Cross-Channel Unitarity," under the direction of James Young, the first African American tenured full professor in the physics department at MIT. In 1975, the thesis was published in Annals of Physics.

After she received her Ph.D. that year, Jackson got a job as a research associate in Theoretical Physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. While at 0">Fermilab, Jackson studied medium to large subatomic particles, specifically hadrons, a subatomic particle with a strong nuclear force. Throughout the 1970s, Jackson would work in this area and on Landau theories of charge density waves in one- and two-dimensions, as well as Tang-Mills gauge theories and neutrino reactions.

In 1974, after two years with the Fermilab, Jackson served as Visiting Science Associate at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland and worked on theories of strongly interacting elementary particles. In 1975, she returned to the Fermilab, and was simultaneously elected to the MIT Corporation's Board of Trustees. In 1976, Jackson began working on the Technical Staff for Bell Telephone laboratories in theoretical physics, investigating the electronic properties of certain material that could carry a larger current than the technology that existed at the time. While at Bell, Jackson met her husband, physicist Morris A. Washington. This same year, Jackson was appointed Professor of Physics at Rutgers University teaching both undergraduate and graduate students. In 1980, she became the president of the National Society of Black Physicists, and in 1985 began serving as a member of the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.

In 1991, Jackson served as a professor at Rutgers while working for AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, working with charged density waves and the reactions of neutrinos. In 1995, Jackson was appointed by then President Clinton to the position of Chairperson of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In 1997, Jackson led the formation of the International Nuclear Regulators Association. In 1998, Jackson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The following year, she became the eighteenth President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jackson continues to advocate on behalf of women and minorities in the sciences and, since 2001, has brought needed attention to the "Quiet Crisis" of America's predicted inability to innovate in the face of a looming scientific workforce shortage.

Jackson lives with her husband in New York.

Jackson was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on September 22, 2006.