Shirley Ann Jackson Biography

Shirley Ann Jackson FREng (born August 5, 1946) is an American physicist, and the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the first African-American woman to have earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the second African-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics, and the first to be awarded the National Medal of Science.