Nuclear power, and caller ID

Hurrah—it’s Ada Lovelace Day! You know—the one day of the year that we consider ourselves all diverse and inclusive to recall the contributions made to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math by women.

In years past, I’ve written about such brilliant minds as Grace Hopper (whose celebration I attended just last week); Nobel Laureate (for physiology/medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (who developed the radio frequency hopping system that underpins mobile telephony); research chemist Marie M. Daly; IDEO designer Barbara Beskind; and Joan Struthers Curran and Beatrice Shilling, engineers whose work contributed to our victory in the Second World War.

If you’ve ever used caller ID to screen phone calls (before the telemarketers and IRS scam artists learned to spoof their numbers), you can thank today’s entry. Shirley Ann Jackson, a DC native, was the first African-American to be granted a doctorate from MIT; it was in nuclear physics, and the year was 1973.

Jackson’s career spanned serious bench research at prestigious labs in the United States and Europe, including AT&T Bell Laboratories, where her discoveries contributed to advances in semiconductors, and to the development of touch-tone telephony, caller ID/call waiting, fiber optics and solar cells. President Bill Clinton appointed her the Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where she assisted in the establishment of the International Nuclear Regulators Association.

Since July of 1999, Jackson has served as president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. I kind of wish she’d stayed at the bench and come up with a way to shut out all the telemarketers and scammers, but I suppose that’s too much to hope from even as remarkable a woman as Jackson.