Jane Blankenship


Jane Blankenship is an American chemist. She won high science honors while at Oak Ridge High School before graduating in June 1958 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a B.S. in chemistry. She worked summers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where her father Dr. Forest F. Blankenship was a physical chemist, and then married Carl H. Gibson, a chemical engineer, and became employed as a spectroscopist for Lockheed Aircraft in Palo Alto, California.

National attention

In 1961, a news story was written regarding “sex desegregation” in the sciences and a photograph of her was utilized to illustrate the critical significance of inspiring women to pursue careers in science.
As of 2008 Professor David Kaiser of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began offering a graduate level course titled “Cold War Science” that discussed the role women featured during the Cold War and included Jane Blankenship Gibson as an example.

Thesis

  • Rotational Analysis of the 0-0 Band of the B2 Σ U -> X2 Σ g Transition of N+ 2 from Shock Tube Spectra.

Selected publications