College president and physicist Walter E. Massey was born on April 5, 1938 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was raised by his step-father, Almar Cleveland Massey, and mother, Essie Nelson Massey. Segregated society made life difficult for him and his family but his parents raised him with the mentality to stay safe, be proud, and deal with discrimination. During the...

Physicist and education administrator Arlene P. Maclin was born in Brunswick County, Virginia on June 7, 1945 to parents Otis Armstead and Alice Matthews Maclin. Maclin attended Hickory Run Elementary School and Rawlings Elementary School, and graduated from James Solomon High School in 1963. Upon graduation, Maclin enrolled at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University, where she graduated with...

Physicist and physics professor Donald R. Lyons was born in 1954 in Stamps, Arkansas. His father, Patrick Donald Lyons, Jr., was a bricklayer; his mother, a housewife. After attending J.L. Jones Elementary School and J.A. Phillips Jr., High School, Lyons graduated from, Webster High School in 1972. While in high school, Lyons enrolled in the Upward Bound program. With...

Physicist and physics professor Clifford Johnson (1958 – ) conducted research at the University of Southern California which focused on D-branes, quantum gravity, gauge theory, and M-theory. He has has been listed in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education as the most highly cited black professor of mathematics or a related field at an American university or college....

Education administrator and physicist Calvin Lowe was born in Roanoke Rapids, Michigan in 1955. After graduating from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University with his B.S. degree in physics, Lowe enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he earned his M.S. degree in plasma physics in 1979. Upon completing his doctoral thesis, “Optical Properties of Graphite...

Physicist Anthony M. Johnson was born on May 23, 1954 in Brooklyn, New York to James W. Johnson and Helen Y. Johnson. He initially wanted to study math or chemistry in college until a teacher at Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, New York introduced him to physics. Johnson attended the Polytechnic Institute of New York where he...

Physicist Keith Hunter Jackson was born on September 24, 1953 in Columbus, Ohio to Gloria and Russell Jackson. He earned two B.S. degrees, one in physics from Morehouse College and one in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jackson then moved to California where he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1979 and...

Physicist and university president Shirley Ann Jackson (1946 – ) served as professor of physics at Rutger University before being named the eighteenth President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jackson was the first African American woman to receive her doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an appointment by President...

Physicist and Professor Wendell T. Hill, III was born in 1952 in Berkeley, California to Wendell Hill, Jr. and Marcella Washington Hill, who met at Drake University in the 1940s. In the 1960s his father was the Chief Pharmacist at in the Orange County Medical Center, now the University of California Irvine Medical Center, and finished his career as...

Professor Calvin Howell was born on December 7, 1955 in Warrenton, North Carolina. After graduating from high school, Howell earned his B.S. degree in physics from Davidson College in 1978. He then attended Duke University where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1984 with a specialty in experimental nuclear physics. Then, Howell conducted postdoctoral research at the Triangle Universities...