Day 18 - Dr. Shirley Jackson - Who's Calling?

who first tamed fire???

Every single piece of technology you have ever used had to be invented by someone. Everything you wear had to be woven or created by some other process. The names of people who first figured out how to create those things are lost to us. We don't know the name of the first person who figured out how to cook over open flames, or created writing or made the first paintings, or anything like that.

That is understandable. Most of those things were invented so long ago, nobody has any idea when and how they came into being.

What about some of the things you use every day? Do you know much about who created the technology we take for granted?

Dr. Jackson

Once you meet Dr. Shirley Jackson, you will know a great deal more about some everyday things!

Dr. Jackson did so many things and is still doing so many things that there is no way to encapsulate it in this quick bite.

Shirley Ann Jackson was born in 1946. She graduated as the valedictorian from her high school, and was pleased to be accepted into MIT!

That's when things got difficult. Not because of the work. That was hard, but that wasn't the biggest thing. Her classmates shunned her.

She tells a tale of being told to go away the first time she tried to join a study group with her white peers.

Being the only black woman getting a physics degree did not make her a popular person in the 1960s.

If you want to read about the journey that saw her decide to stay at MIT, fight to get more minority students admitted, create the first Black Student Union on campus, and keep excelling until she'd become the very first African American woman to graduate with a PH.D. from MIT in 1973, click here.

Her Ph.D. is in Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics!

Once she left MIT, she did a whole bunch of very cool stuff.

She did her post-doc work with Fermilab and CERN. CERN is the European organization for nuclear research. It is where they have the Large Hadron Collider! I am seriously geeked out by that! Fermilab is the American particle physics laboratory.

Where did she go from there?

Bell laboratories - for those of you who don't know, this means she went to work in telecommunications.

What on earth is a particle physicist going to do at a telephone company?

Simple -

Dr. Shirley Jakson is responsible for a few wee bits of technology that you might have used in your lifetime.

- Touch Tone Telephones
- Portable Fax Machine
- Caller ID
- Call Waiting
- Fiber Optic Cables

After she left Bell Labs. she did some other stuff.

1995 - President Clinton appointed her to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She led international efforts to promote nuclear safety.
1997 - She helped establish the International Nuclear Regulators Association. She served as the first chairperson.
2001 - She was the first African American Woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering
2004 - She was the President of the Association for the Advancement of Science

National Medal of Science

2009 - President Obama appointed her to the President's Council of Advisors on Science.
2015 - President Obama awarded Dr. Jackson the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for contributions in science and engineering.

She currently holds 53 honorary degrees and is president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue in Troy, New York.

So, the next time you don't have to answer the phone for that annoying telemarketer, or you get a beep because someone else is trying to reach you, give a silent thank you to Dr. Jackson!

#Celebrate Black History!