FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Maya Matthews Minter
[email protected]
Phone: 703.385.2411
Dr. John Hope Franklin Award to be presented to Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson on April 14 during the ACE annual meeting
Jackson is a theoretical physicist and inventor, described as a trailblazer, innovator, and path builder. She is renowned as a transformative leader not only in academia but also in industry and government. On July 1, she retired as the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where she was the first African American woman to lead a top-ranked research university. At her 1999 inauguration, she vowed to increase RPI’s profile; under her presidential tenure more than $1.25 billion was invested and the campus was transformed by state-of-the-art research platforms.
Among her numerous appointments and awards, in 2014, President Barack Obama appointed her co-chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board on which she served until Obama left office. In February 2020, she joined The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) global board of directors to serve until 2029. Prior to her RPI presidency, she served as chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the first woman and first African American to hold that position. From 1991 to 1995, Jackson worked as professor of physics at Rutgers University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate students, conducted research, and supervised Ph.D. candidates while continuing work in semiconductor theory at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., and attended Roosevelt Senior High School. She earned her bachelor’s degree and doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); she was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate from MIT and one of the first two African American women to receive a doctorate in physics in the U.S.
