She has chaired the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She was the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She is the president of a major research institution.
And, today, the Honorable Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson will give the 230th commencement address.
Born in 1946, Jackson grew up with her brother and two sisters in Washington, D.C. The four Jackson children were encouraged in their schoolwork by their parents Beatrice, a social worker, and George, a postal officer.
"My parents were very focused," Jackson told The Dartmouth in a phone interview earlier this week.
She said her mother taught her and her siblings to read while her father nourished interests in the sciences. Jackson's aptitude and love for science was apparent early on.
In the sixth and seventh grades, she began performing her first, self-designed experiments.
"I used to collect live bumblebees; I would change their diets, habitats, expose them to varying amounts of light and heat," she said. "I kept detailed logs. I used to catch them myself."
Before she entered seventh grade in 1955, the 1954 Supreme Court's ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. effectively desegregated the public schools of the Washington, D.C. area.
"I probably benefited from it," Jackson said. "The tracking system was put into place when the schools were integrated."
Children were tested via this tracking system which encountered criticism for resembling IQ testing. Luckily for Jackson, she scored well on the test and was placed on an accelerated learning path.
Jackson said she doesn't remember dealing with much discrimination while growing up, though the effects of segregation may have been present.
"When we went to visit family in Virginia, we didn't stop at restaurants or reststops along the way," she said.
But the segregation didn't make much of an impact on her as a child. "I led a very sheltered life," she said.
In the spring of 1964, she graduated first in her class at Roosevelt High School. That fall she enrolled at M.I.T.
She had been encouraged to apply to the school by an assistant principal in high school. She never visited the school before deciding to enroll.
In the fall of 1964, she was one of two African-American women and 30 women total in the freshman class. Jackson said the experience was initially very "isolating."
She encountered real discrimination in the midst of the civil rights movement. Students would often refuse to sit next to her in class or work with her on homework. But things changed.
"I did very well," Jackson said. "Once they found out what I could do, they would come to me but initially only for help with questions."
Jackson said M.I.T. was "never hard academically, but the isolation and hostility was tough at times." Despite that, she said she never once considered leaving the school.
"I tend to be very focused," she said. "I enjoyed the work."
In addition to her studies, Jackson chose to help others. Jackson also volunteered at Boston City Hospital and the Roxbury YMCA, saying, "I was always taught that you should do something to help someone else."
She graduated from M.I.T. with a B.S. degree in 1968, around the time of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Orangeburg Massacre.
"I was profoundly affected by the assassinations and protests," she said. "Those were times that were troubling for many people."
"Some were more affected by the war, some were more affected by Bobby Kennedy's assassination," Jackson said, noting the vast differences in the views of her fellow graduates.
Jackson, who was one of only five African-Americans in her entering class, said, "I always worked to change M.I.T."
"I wanted [M.I.T.] to be fundamentally more hospitable [to minorities]," she told The Dartmouth. By hospitable, Jackson said she meant "more."
She spent a year recruiting black students from around the country with Associate Provost and professor of electrical engineering Dr. Paul E. Gray, "one of her best friends."
Jackson was phenomenally successful. The number of African-American students per class jumped from an average of three to five to 57 in the fall of 1969.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Jackson chose to stay at M.I.T., to continue her education despite receiving offers from other universities.
In 1973, she earned a Ph.D. from M.I.T., making her the first African American woman to ever earn a doctorate from the university. After finishing, she did post-doctorate work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, as a research associate. She also worked as a visiting scientist at the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.
Later, Jackson researched theoretical physics, solid state and quantum physics, and optical physics at AT&T Bell Laboratories. She worked there from 1976 to 1991.
Then, she became a physics professor at Rutgers University in 1991, while at the same time consulting in semiconductor theory at AT&T.
Jackson served as commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and in 1995, was appointed chairwoman.
Jackson was an advisor to the Secretary of Energy on the future of Department of Energy national laboratories. She served on research councils for the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. She has won countless awards for her scientific and political achievements.
In September of last year, Jackson was inaugurated as the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
