Terri Miller

Kate Jackson executes a jump with her horse, Plácido. They don't jump this high in intercollegiate competition because the donated horses can't do it. "Plácido is a fantastic horse," Jackson says.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- There are only two universities in the United States that have both a top-level engineering program and an NCAA-recognized women's equestrian team: Cornell and the University of Texas. That somewhat obscure fact has advanced the cause of research that might someday lead to more reliable electronics.

Kate Jackson has had a passion for horses for as long as she can remember. On her eighth birthday, her parents gave her riding lessons, and by the time she was in high school she was participating in the international Young Riders program, riding her own horse, a Belgian Warmblood named Plácido. By that time the family had moved to Houston. When it came time to go to college there were only those two choices, and "I wanted to get out of Texas," she recalls.

Equestrian competition requires a rider to guide a horse around a ring with a series of obstacles, including low jumps, using a series of subtle body movements to control the mount. Judging is based on technique and artistic impression. To create a "level playing field," riders are assigned randomly to horses provided by the home team. Plácido stayed behind in Houston.

At Cornell, Jackson found a varsity women's equestrian team but also a demanding schedule. The team's practices in the Oxley Equestrian Center started at 6 a.m. "I was falling asleep in class," Jackson admits.

Halfway through her sophomore year she quit the team. "There were four engineers on the team of 30," she recalls, "and none of them made it all four years." In order to keep riding, she asked to have Plácido sent to Ithaca. "I made a deal with my dad," Jackson reports. "He said I could have the horse or the car sent up." She chose the horse and made a deal with Megan Dines '03, Meng '04 who had also dropped out of the equestrian team, to trade riding privileges for car privileges.

The good news was that quitting the team gave Jackson more time for an undergraduate research project. She joined Associate Professor Shefford Baker's group, studying the behavior of tantalum thin films, which are used in inkjet cartridges, as X-ray lithography masks and beneath the copper conductors in integrated circuits to keep the copper from diffusing into the silicon chip. But repeated heating and cooling causes the tantalum to crack, which is one reason inkjet cartridges and computer chips don't last forever. Jackson's job was to make scanning electron microscope photos of the films before and after heating. The photos have revealed curious behavior in the crystalline structure of the metal that Baker's group is still trying to understand.

Jackson's father is an electrical and computer engineer, her mother an English teacher. With that background she was never sure which way to go but decided to study engineering first, then perhaps apply her verbal skills to that background. For now, she has taken a job with General Electric studying polymer chemistry, but her long-range plan is to go to law school and practice patent law. "What gets me excited about engineering is creating something that makes life better for people," she explains. "I think my communications skills could bridge the gap for engineers to explain their ideas."