Shirley Ann Jackson, FREng (born August 5, 1946) is an American physicist, and was the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the first African American woman to have earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics, and the first African American woman to have earned a doctorate at MIT in any field. She is also the second African American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics.