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:
“For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.”
—Walter Pater 1839–1894, British writer, educator. originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Aug. 1878)
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)