MIT student Megan Yamoah named Rhodes Scholar

Megan Yamoah, from Davis, California, is a senior majoring in physics and electrical engineering. The daughter of immigrants from Ghana and Thailand, she seeks to expand on her engineering background to tackle questions involving technology and international development. At Oxford, she will pursue an MPhil in economics to acquire knowledge in development economics and study how innovation can positively impact emerging economies.

A Goldwater Scholar with several first-author publications and a patent to her name, Yamoah has focused on the cutting edge of quantum computing. As a high school student, she conducted research in the Goldhaber-Gordon Laboratory at Stanford University. Since her freshman year at MIT, she has been assisting Professor William Oliver in the Engineering Quantum Systems Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. She also did a summer research internship in the Q Circuits Group at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. This past summer, Yamoah attended workshops for the MIT Regional Acceleration Program (REAP) where she connected with diverse stakeholders from around the world on developing initiatives for spurring innovation.

As president of the MIT chapter of the Society of Physics Students, Yamoah worked to develop a physics department statement of values, the first of its kind at MIT. She is an executive board member of Undergraduate Women in Physics and has served multiple roles in the Society of Women Engineers. As a project committee member for MIT Design for America, Yamoah organized workshops for teams creating technology-based solutions for local challenges such as food insecurity.

The Remarkable Career of Shirley Ann Jackson

Shirley Ann Jackson worked to help bring about more diversity at MIT, where she was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate. She then applied her mix of vision and pragmatism in the lab, in Washington, and at the helm of a major research university.

Shirley Ann Jackson arrived at MIT in the fall of 1964 as one of just a handful of black students and the valedictorian of her public high school in Washington, D.C. In the midst of working on her first physics problem set, she emerged from her room and noticed all the other first-year women on her floor out in a common area, doing theirs together. “If you know anything about MIT, you know that working the problem sets is a big deal,” she says. “So I gathered up my paperwork and said, ‘May I join you?’

“One of them looked up and said, ‘Go away.’

“I said, ‘I’ve done half the problems already and I know how to do the other ones.’

“And another girl said, ‘Didn’t you hear her? She said go away.’”

And that was just the start. “It was pretty isolating,” Jackson says of her undergraduate years. Students avoided sitting next to her in lecture halls. If she joined others in the dining room, they would generally finish faster or skip their dessert. When that freshman study group rejected her, she went back to her room and cried. But after a while she told herself, “Well, I do have to hand in these physics problems.” So, she says, “I got myself together and finished the work.”

As a girl, Jackson studied the circadian rhythms of bees she captured from flowers and shrubs around her home.

Jackson would need that kind of resilience to see her through nine years at MIT, as both an undergraduate and a graduate student in physics. Becoming the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from the Institute—in any field—served as prologue to a career that has spanned research, public policy, and academic leadership. She’s worked as a theoretical physicist at Bell Laboratories and chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She co-chaired President Obama’s President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and served on the boards of IBM and FedEx. And since 1999, she’s been president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

“It’s nearly impossible to understand the full sweep of Shirley’s career, from academia to government to business,” says Sylvester Gates, a physicist at Brown University who considered Jackson his mentor at MIT. “She has been extraordinarily successful in all of those realms. She also has a magnificent ability to understand organizations and how to be effective within them ... She has always been the cool head in the group.”

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