Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, received a contract extension through June 2022. Dr. Jackson usually ranks at or near the top in rankings of the highest-paid college presidents in the country.
In announcing the contract extension, Arthur Golden, chairman of the board of trustees at RPI stated that “we are extremely pleased to have retained such a dynamic, strategic leader and visionary for the past two decades in this highly competitive environment. We are especially proud of President Jackson’s outstanding accomplishments in advancing Rensselaer as a top-tier technological research university.”
Dr. Jackson was chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1995 to 1999. She then left government service to take over as the 18th president of RPI in 1999. In 2016, Dr. Jackson was awarded the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama.
Dr. Jackson holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in any discipline from MIT.