Early Life, Education and Family
Lisa Jackson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was adopted weeks after her birth. She grew up in Pontchartrain Park, a predominantly African-American middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1979, Jackson graduated as valedictorian from Saint Mary's Dominican High School in New Orleans. She received a scholarship from the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering & Science due to her strong performance in mathematics. This allowed her to gain early exposure to a college environment.
She attended Tulane University with a scholarship from Shell Oil Company. A dean at the Tulane School of Engineering got her interested in that discipline as an academic path, and she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1983. Jackson then earned her Master of Science degree, also in chemical engineering, from Princeton University in 1986.
Jackson's mother was living in New Orleans at the time Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005, and Jackson drove her out of the city. Jackson is married to Kenneth Jackson and is the mother of two children.
Jackson has been a resident of East Windsor Township, New Jersey, along with her husband and two sons.
Read more about this topic: Lisa P. Jackson
Famous quotes containing the words early, education and/or family:
“Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The worldling’s eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
And dear and early friends—the few”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)