Discovering Shirley Caldwell

When it came time for Shirley Caldwell to think about college scholarships, she decided to apply for only one. When her father pleaded with her to consider others as a safety net she told him that Queens University in Ontario was what she wanted, and so that's what she would get.

Roughly four years later, with a bobbed freshman haircut having grown to rest smoothly on her shoulders, and a gaze that had taken on an even deeper layer of determination, Shirley graduated with honors as one of two females in the university's chemistry department, and was headed for Sierra Leone.

"Once I went to grad school and started on the path to being a scientist, there was no taking a break," Tilghman said as she sat in the office which adjoins her own molecular biology lab in Lewis Thomas laboratory.

But while friends say Shirley might have been unsure of her professional path even when she returned from teaching secondary school in West Africa two years later, she had already armed herself with ambition for a steady hike to the uncertain summit of her future career.

Though she would one day achieve preeminence in the field of molecular biology, serving as an architect of the Human Genome Project and pioneering the study of mammalian genetics, Shirley was driven by a more general, unstoppable inner drive, prior to choosing her particular goals.

As she climbed the heights of her career, she never lost sight of the vistas, her friends, her hobbies, and often paused at the plateaus — of marriage, of divorce, of motherhood. But had she ever come to a lengthy stop — had she stopped for too long to admire any one view, she might never have reached the top.

Born in Toronto, Shirley lived in three other Canadian cities before going off to college. It was her father — whose job as a national banker moved the family's home — who had the greatest influence on his daughter's life.

Compelled to start anew with each move, Shirley gained independence, and at a time when the glass ceiling had yet to be broken, her father told her that nothing should stand in the way of achieving her goals.

"Anything that she wanted to do, it was very much encouraged that she should do," said Tilghman's youngest sister, Tracey Chapman.

"Shirley had a very strong personality right from the beginning," she added. "There was definitely no disagreeing with her."

Shirley's boldness and quick, well-articulated temper, which left her sister stumbling for words, were out of synch with the rest of her more "mellow" family, according to Chapman.

"[It was] a little source of bewilderment for my mother," said Chapman. The girls' mother — a housewife with no college education — laughed if someone thought she could sway Shirley's opinion or tell her what to do.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

But while Shirley stood out from her family in certain respects, she also blended in, sharing their sentimentality — often crying with the family at commercials — and a sense of humor, which she acquired from her father.

..."[She's] someone who's very able to laugh at herself. It can also be very dry," Chapman said. "She's very able to look at the world the way it is and laugh at it."

...Helen Cooper, who befriended Shirley as the other female in Queens's chemistry department, remembered the two spending one moment in the Union Coffee Shop solving the world's problems, which revolved around Vietnam, and the next, laughing and singing pop songs as they drove off in Helen's flaming red Mustang for a spring ski trip.

For Tilghman, skiing could be a source of laughter or yet another daring adventure.

Two years ago, when Shirley told one of her students she had spent her spring break skiing at a well-known resort, he jokingly asked her whether she had skiied "the chute." The most difficult run on the mountain, the chute was a nearly vertical, ice-covered slope that had been carved from a glacier.

"Yeah," she told Harrison Gable '01, whom Tilghman advised on his thesis, "but just once, and then my self-control had to kick in."

"She had just published an article in Nature magazine and skiied the chute," said Gable, eyes wide in recollection.

It was as though from whatever height and whatever country, she was ready to take on the world.

But while a younger Shirley, after returning from West Africa, embarked on the next stage of her life with wide-eyed idealism, she later in life realized that an entire world could not fit within the parameters of her actual existence.

Shirley met her ex-husband — who is now posted with the foreign service in Hong Kong — while she was teaching in Sierra Leone and he was working for the Peace Corps. She had her first child, Rebecca, shortly before she earned faculty tenure in the early 1980s. A little over a year later her son Alex was born, and when her children were two years and six months respectively, divorce left her a single mother.

In between lab work and feeding her children, Tilghman would sometimes lecture to young women about the bright future that lay ahead for female scientists. Raising children, while performing groundbreaking research and gaining tenure, was certainly possible she enthusiastically told them, living proof as she stood behind a podium.

You could do it all.

At age 54, the renowned molecular biologist, having raised two children and recently become the first female president of Princeton Univer-sity, sat silent for a moment when asked about her earlier balancing act.

..."My views on that have changed over time," said Tilghman, whose usual gesticulations and animated voice had been replaced by a tone of reserved reflection.

In order to cope with her difficult decisions as a young parent, Tilghman honed the skill of managing guilt. When she was at work she did not think about her children and when she was at home she did not think about the lab.

"The older I get, the more I realize how difficult it is and how difficult it was," she said.

"It's not that I've become pessimistic. Just realistic."