Soror Shirley Ann Jackson, president, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and renowned theoretical physicist, will receive an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Pennsylvania at Almanac on May 15, 2006.
Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Hartford, CT, the oldest technological research university in the U.S., has held senior leadership positions in government, industry, research, and academe.
Dr. Jackson is immediate past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and currently chairman of the AAAS Board of Directors, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society, and has advisory roles and involvement in other prestigious national organizations. She serves as a trustee of the Brookings Institution, a life member of the M.I.T Corporation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Council on Competitiveness and serves on the boards of Georgetown University and Rockefeller University. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange, the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, and is a director of several major corporations.
She was appointed chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 1995-1999, by U.S. President William J. Clinton. At the NRC, Dr. Jackson reorganized the agency, and completely revamped its regulatory approach, by articulating, and moving strongly to, risk-informed, performance-based regulation. Prior to that, she was a theoretical physicist at the former AT&T Bell Laboratories and a professor of theoretical physics at Rutgers University.
Dr. Jackson holds an S.B. in physics and a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics from M.I.T., and 32 honorary doctoral degrees.
http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes...ment-a.html#sj