Mary W. Jackson
No Longer Hidden: NASA Announces Washington DC Headquarters Will Be Named After Mary W. Jackson
Source: Donaldson Collection / Getty NASA engineer and mathematician Mary W. Jackson is finally getting her just due. On Wednesday (Jun 24) NASA announced plans to rename their headquarters located in Washington DC after the first Black female aerospace engineer Mary W. Jackson. Jackson, who was the agency’s first American American female engineer in 1958, opened up opportunities for countless women of color in STEM who followed in her footsteps. “Mary W. Jackson was part of a group of very important women who helped NASA succeed in getting American astronauts into space. Mary never accepted the status quo, she helped break barriers and open opportunities for African Americans and women in the field of engineering and technology,” Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement to CBS Ne...
NASA Headquarters Named After its First Black Female Engineer
Sourced from Getty Images. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC will be named after Mary W. Jackson, the first African-American female engineer to work at the aerospace company. Jackson, who passed away in 2005, started her NASA career in the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. She was a mathematician and aerospace engineer went on to lead programs influencing the hiring and promotion of women in NASA’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. In 2019, she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Donald Trump, along with her “Hidden Figures” contemporaries in Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Christine Darden. /* custom css *...
