In Her Own Words: Black Women Scientists Reflect on Meaningful Accomplishments
In celebration of Women’s History Month, I wanted to highlight some of the achievements of Black women in the sciences. Over the years, AIP has interviewed dozens of incredibly accomplished Black women scientists, and I was curious about what they considered to be their most meaningful research achievements and scholarly accolades. While looking through our oral history interview collection , I found three quotes on the subject in the transcripts of interviews by chemical engineer Paula Hammond, biomedical engineer Anjelica Gonzalez, and physicist Shirley Ann Jackson.
Paula Hammond
Paula Hammond sitting against a colorful background.
Photo courtesy of MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Paula Hammond is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also serves as the Dean of MIT’s School of Engineering and is the first woman to hold this position. She is a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Principal Investigator of the Hammond Lab , which focuses on using polymeric nanomaterials and electrostatics to create cell-targeted drug delivery systems.
Hammond was born September 3, 1963, in Detroit, Michigan, where she spent her formative years. Growing up, her father was a biochemist and her mother was a nurse, which gave her an appreciation for science, health, and education at a young age. Hammond attended an all-girls school called the Academy of the Sacred Heart, where she went to her first chemistry lab. She attended MIT for her undergraduate studies, where she felt at home with other students who were equally passionate about science. She completed her Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering and worked as a process engineer at Motorola for two years before returning to school. Upon completion of her Master of Science in chemical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she returned to her first alma mater to get her PhD. Hammond was accepted to the then-new Polymer Science and Technology program and was excited to pursue research with a fresh perspective. She then got an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard to do research on carbon nanotube electrodes for high-density batteries, with an understanding that she would return to MIT as an assistant professor. With MIT as her home institution, she started doing research on liquid crystalline block copolymers, controlled deposition based on hydrogen bonding, and electrostatics, as well as creating lightweight thin film device systems. Hammond started shifting towards working with biomaterials and collaborating with biologists to work on drug delivery and other biotechnology innovations. Currently, her lab is conducting research and developing technologies to improve bone regeneration and wound healing, drug delivery for cancer treatment, and oxygen transport and coagulation control.
Some of her major accolades include but are not limited to the Department of Defense Ovarian Cancer Teal Innovator Award in 2013 for leading ovarian cancer research, the Inaugural Black in Cancer Distinguished Investigator Award in 2021, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2025 by then-President Biden.
Paula Hammond, along with other MIT faculty, being awarded the 2024 National Medal of Science.
Photo courtesy of MIT News.
In her AIP oral history interview conducted by David Zierler in 2020 , Zierler asked Hammond about which recognition has meant the most to her over the years.
Zierler:
I certainly don’t want to burden you with a discussion about all of the amazing awards and recognitions you’ve received over the course of your career, but I do wonder if there’s one that is most personally meaningful to you, either because of the research associated with the award, or as a matter of scholarly affirmation with which your colleagues hold you in such high esteem.
Hammond:
Well, for scholarly affirmation, it would be my recent elections into the National Academies of Medicine, Engineering, and Science. Kind of happened in that order. Because those are huge validations of recognition by my peers. And so, that means a huge amount because of the nature of that. It also means a lot because the National Academies are about service. And they’re about really providing a voice of science to our government. That was why they were founded, and I think it inspires me. I like to think about it as one meaningful way in which I may be able to help voice to policymakers, to influencers what is important about science, and why we need to maintain it, and why we need to listen to it. So, I think that has sort of a dual meaning to me because I’ve always had an interest in how science influences our society, our government, and how it can help us. And I think that the National Academies sits at that nexus.
In terms of personal, there are a couple. The Margaret Rousseau [Award] is one that is meaningful to me for a couple of reasons, as she was among the first women to get a PhD in chemical engineering. And she has an incredible story, I think, of helping to save the world through a sort of biopharma, biochemical manufacturing of Penicillin. Penicillin had been discovered, but you can’t do a lot when you can only make this much. And this is really where chemical engineering plays a role in the bigger world. We’re still at that center of the same kinds of pharma manufacturing wonders that have allowed us to have 100-million doses of Pfizer and 100-million doses of Moderna ready for us after just an eight-month incubation period. So, Margaret Rousseau represents that part of chemical engineering as well as the impact of women in the field. And she’s from MIT. So, that adds something personal as well. And I also recently received the Percy Julian Award from NOBCChE. And that really is a recognition from my own community. NOBCChE is the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, and they provided a short-term fellowship when I was in my graduate life. I think in my third or fourth year. Just going back to that and going back to some of the roots of other African-American scientists and engineers there to support each other and affirm each other’s work, and to promote the importance of science to the rest of the community, I think, is really important. And to increase the visibility of people of color in our field. So, receiving the Percy Julian Award, which is the highest award that we have in this organization, was very meaningful. Again, selected by my peers. And Percy Julian, of course, being a hugely impactful chemist with a very interesting and inspiring life. So, that also had personal meaning.
Anjelica Gonzalez
Headshot of Anjelica Gonzalez.
Photo Credit: Yale University – TSAI City.
Anjelica Gonzalez is the Raymond John Wean Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. Additionally, she serves as Faculty Director of the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Vascular Biology and Therapeutics Program as well as of the Yale Institute for Global Health. Her lab focuses on developing technologies to address issues regarding wound repair, scar formation, fibrosis, and stroke.
Gonzalez grew up in Las Vegas and Moapa Valley in Nevada. She developed a love for science through accompanying her grandparents while they worked on their farm, where she was exposed to the mechanics of field irrigation and engineering. She got a full-ride scholarship to Utah State University, where she studied biological and irrigational engineering with the plan to return to Moapa Valley to take over her grandfather’s job on the farm. She ended up attending the Summer Medical and Research Training Program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where she learned to apply her mechanical knowledge in a biophysical setting. She then attended graduate school at Baylor, obtaining her PhD in Computational Biology. Her dissertation was on white blood cells’ interactions with then-emerging polymers and plastics technology developed to mimic human tissues. Gonzalez did her postdoctoral work at the Leukocyte Biology and Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Texas Children’s Hospital and worked at Yale as an associate research scientist, where she eventually joined the biomedical engineering department. She started Gonzalez Lab , where she and her team created a blood vessel out of different types of human cells. They also study pericytes and their signals to understand restorative processes and ways to address disease progression, and they invented PremieBreathe, a low-cost respiratory device for newborns with respiratory complications. They are currently working to scale up their distribution to have their device available in hospitals in under-resourced countries.
Some of her other accomplishments and accolades include: Yale Provost’s Teaching Prize (2014), winner of the USAID/Gates Foundation DevelopmentxChange Investor Pitch Competition (2017) for her development of PremieBreathe, and induction into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow Class of 2020 for research innovations in microvascular function and pathologies.
Anjelica Gonzalez with members of Gonzalez Lab.
Photo Credit: Yale University – Gonzalez Lab.
In her oral history interview with David Zierler in 2020 , Zierler asks her about her favorite research accomplishment.
Zierler:
Is there any research accomplishment, to go back to the beginning of our conversation, when you knew sort of intuitively, even as a girl, that you wanted to produce tangible help for people. So right, on that basis, surveying your entire research agenda. Is there anything that stands out in your mind in terms of that tangibility, in terms of that clear help to society and to humanity that you’ve been involved with that really jumps out in your memory?
Gonzalez:
Oh. That’s a tough question. Because I know what my favorite scientific accomplishment has been. I don’t know if it’s under-appreciated, but the struggle is under-appreciated. [laugh] So when we think about the blood vessel wall, we think about the cells the line the vessel. The large blood vessel structure is what everybody studied for decades. What people have not studied in the small vessel, and the specific cells that contribute to the micro-vessel wall. There’s a specific cell type called the pericyte. And this pericyte has mechanical and contractile functions that regulates the blood flow within of the small vessel... Between 2010 and 2012, I developed the first co-culture of human endothelial cells, the cells on the inside of the vessel wall, and pericytes, these cells on the outside of the vessel wall. We were actually able to take human leukocytes, neutrophils, and have them migrate from the inside of the blood vessel stream through all parts of that vessel wall, to mimic the process of inflammation. And to me, building a model of human micro-blood vessel that then can be used for investigation, is a fundamental and transformative advance. This system has now been used to dissect the function of the individual cells, it can be used to probe molecular interactions between cells and can be triggered to model disease. It’s, as small as it is--literally small [laugh] as it is, it is the thing that I’m most proud of. Creating something that’s so close to human, is made of human, will help cure diseases that are detrimental to humans.
Shirley Ann Jackson
Shirley Jackson leaning against a railing.
Photo Credit: Shirley Jackson.
Shirley Ann Jackson is a theoretical physicist and President Emerita of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She previously served as Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board during the Obama administration and advised on matters of science and technology policy and data analytics. She currently serves as the director of Kyndryl and Global Board Secretary of The Nature Conservancy.
Jackson was born on August 5, 1946, in Washington, D.C., where she spent her youth. She had a passion and aptitude for math and spent much of her time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, National Museum of Natural History, and the Library of Congress. Her high school assistant principal and her father both encouraged her to pursue science at MIT, where she would become the one of the first African American women to earn a doctorate.* As an undergraduate, she researched the tunneling density of states in superconducting niobium-titanium alloys. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., coupled with the racism and hostility she faced at MIT, Jackson formed and co-chaired the Black Student Union to improve the conditions for Black students. She stayed at MIT for her graduate studies and focused on elementary particle theory, earning that historic PhD. She spent her postdoctoral years at Fermilab and CERN, where she built on the strong interaction physics research she had done for her thesis. She went on to work for AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Scattering and Low Energy Physics Research Department and later, the Solid State and Quantum Physics Research Department. She also was a professor at Rutgers University for a few years, splitting her time between Rutgers and Bell Labs before being appointed by then-President Bill Clinton to serve as chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 1995. She had been involved in science public policy in New Jersey, serving on the board for the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and improving nuclear performance. As chairman of the NRC, she authored the Convention on Nuclear Safety and formed the International Nuclear Regulators Association. In 1999, Jackson became the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she served for 23 years before stepping down in 2022.
Some of her major contributions include advancements in telecommunications research that served as the foundation for future inventions such as portable fax machines, touch-tone telephones, fiber optic cables and more. Her awards include: the National Medal of Science in 2014 for her work in condensed matter physics and particle physics and contributions to public policy, and the Burton Award from the 2019 Forum on Physics Society for her work on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Shirley Jackson on tour of a USNRC facility.
Photo Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Ronald E. Mickens Collection
In her 2020 oral history interview with David Zierler , she talks about her most meaningful discoveries and accolades.
Zierler:
Dr. Jackson, all of your achievements and successes post-1995—it might feel like a long time ago but, of course, they rest on your significant achievements in physics. And so I wonder if you can reflect on, what do you see as your primary contributions to physics itself? Not the policy, not the framework, not the administration, but just as a physicist working at a time when you were on a career trajectory like a Mary K., right? To pause that in that moment looking back, what do you see as your most significant achievements as a physicist?
Jackson:
They were—I wouldn’t call them discoveries, because I was a theoretical physicist, but they were discoveries and predictions that I made about the properties of unique two-dimensional systems. The focus on polaronic effects in layered materials starting with electrons on the surface of liquid helium films, which you could almost call it a kind of model system for what would, in semiconductors, be electron phonon interactions. So whole set of contributions in the electronic and optical properties of layered systems, two-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional systems. There are a whole series of things that I did there, beginning with the electrons on liquid helium films all the way to work on diluted magnetic semiconductors. And, along the way, certain predictions and work in zone folding in germanium-silicon strained layer super lattices. That body of work I would say—and it was the work on the two-dimensional polaronic systems that led to my being elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. ...And if you ask me, other than the National Medal of Science, what recognition mattered so much to me in the sciences, it was when I was first elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, because that was my first recognition as a physicist, and it was specifically about the work that I did on these two-dimensional polaronic systems. And so that was pretty big, and it played off of work that I was trained to do in particle physics, but I actually switched into condensed matter physics. And I was able to take work that I was doing in looking at the topological properties of solutions to nonlinear field theories into how topology might play a role in the electronic and optical properties of condensed matter systems. In fact, the work I did on electrons on the surface of liquid helium films specifically involved a kind of topological structure that appeared that affected the mobility of these electrons. And so that was kind of—I look at them as kind of bookends in my career, the election as a fellow of the American Physical society, which was a big deal, because that’s the pure physics, and then my being awarded the National Medal of Science...Now, along the way, I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering because of how work I had done related to science and technology. And, of course, I was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, so those are big deals. But the bookends, when you look at it, are being elected an APS fellow and being awarded the National Medal of Science. Now, I’ve actually gotten some other awards from the APS. I got the Burton Forum Award. I got an award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and so forth. I’ve been very proud of those. But the real bookends are those that I mentioned, being elected an APS fellow and being awarded the National Medal of Science. And so it’s unique.
*In Jackson’s interview, she makes a correction about being the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in physics at MIT. She says she is one of the two first African American women to graduate, the other being her classmate.
To learn more about these three scientists’ stories and accomplishments, check out their oral history interview transcripts.
