Keith H. Jackson was an American physicist, a professor of physics, and former president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
Jackson was born in Columbus, Ohio on September 24, 1953. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Morehouse College and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.ÃÂ In 1979, he earned a master's degree from Stanford University in physics, followed by a Ph.D. in physics in 1982. His thesis research was in the area of photo-dissociation, and his advisor was Dr. Richard N. Zare. He died of cancer in 2013.
After earning his Ph.D., Jackson worked as part of the Gate Dielectric Group at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, and then joined Rockwell International's Rocketdyne division, where he worked on polychrystalline diamond thin films. In 1992, Jackson became the Associate Director at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (LBNL) Center for X-ray Optics. At LBNL, Jackson and his colleagues developed Python-based programming tools that helped physicists efficiently distribute data. One such tool, Py/Globus, was used to efficiently replicate data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to confirm Albert EinsteinâÂÂs General Theory of Relativity.
His research areas included ultraviolet lithography, synchrotron radiation, fabrication of high aspect ratio microstructures, and imaging studies of extreme ultraviolet masks.
Jackson joined Florida A&M University as Vice President of Research and Professor of Physics in 2005, and in 2010, he began working at Morgan State University, as the chairperson of the physics department.
Jackson was a former president of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), as well as an NSBP fellow.