Shelia Nash-Stevenson is an American physicist and engineer. Nash-Stevenson was the first Black woman in Alabama to earn a PhD in physics.[1]
Early life and education
Nash-Stevenson was born and raised in Lawrence County, Alabama.[2] She graduated from Austin High School at the age of sixteen.[3] She studied science and electronic and electrical engineering at Alabama A&M University in 1981.[4][5] She was the first person to graduate from the Alabama A&M University physics masters program, where she was a NASA Fellow.[3] She worked at Marshall Space Flight Center. Her professor, M. C. George, encouraged her to enter a PhD program.[3] She was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in physics at the Alabama A&M University in 1994.[2] During her postgraduate studies she had two children.[3] She is three-times magna cum laude.[2] At the time she was one of fewer than twenty African-American women with a physics PhD in the United States.[2][6] She was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.[5] She worked on photon avalanche upconversion.[7]
Career
Nash-Stevenson joined the United States Army Ballistic Missile Defense Systems Command.[2] She holds a patent for an optical fiber holder.[2] She joined Nichols Research Corporation as a scientist, then Hughes Aircraft Company as a technical researcher.[4] She joined the instrumentation group in Marshall Space Flight Center's avionics lab, where she worked for nearly ten years.[3] She was awarded a NASA Fellowship in 1998, and eventually joined the space craft and vehicle systems group.[3][8] During her fellowship she returned to Alabama A&M University as a professor. She was at Kennedy Space Center to watch the STS-95 launch.[8] She spoke at the 2013 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics.[9]
She won the Modern Figure award of NASA and was selected to attend the premiere of Hidden Figures.[2][12] She took part in several panel discussions and interviews after the film was released.[3][13][14][15][16][17] She gave the convocation talk at Elms College in 2017.[18] In 2018 she was honoured by the WEDC Foundation Women Honoring Women program.[19] She was featured in the AT&T Alabama African-American calendar.[20]
