Dolores Cooper Shockley
Born: April 21, 1930, Clarksdale, MS
Died: October 10, 2020, Nashville, TN
Pharmacology and Neuroscience
Education: Purdue University, Xavier University, Purdue University College of Pharmacy
The first African American woman to earn a doctorate from the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Purdue University. She was also the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in pharmacology in the United States. She is the retired Head of Pharmacology at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. She is also the recipient of the Lederle Faculty Award for Science.
Dolores Shockley became the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Purdue University. She was also the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in pharmacology in the United States. She is the retired Head of Pharmacology at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Professor Dolores Cooper Shockley was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on April 21, 1930, in Clarksdale, Mississippi to a successful family of professionals. Due to her passion for the world of science, her parents encouraged her to purchase chemistry materials for her. As she was excellent in school her viewpoints on how the blacks in the community were lacking certain medical needs. Dolores through this need had in her mind to attend school to become a pharmacist. Her family knew better and had Delores enrolled and attended an out-of-town private Presbyterian school in order for her passion for chemistry would be fulfilled. After high school, she earned a B.S. in pharmacy in 1951 from Xavier University in New Orleans. Having been accepted into eight graduate schools, Cooper chose to continue her
studies at Purdue University. After earning her Ph.D. in pharmacology in 1955, Cooper received a Fulbright Fellowship to the Pharmacology Institute in Copenhagen which allowed her to do postdoctoral research at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. As she stated it took two months to sail there. During that tenure, she would visit pharmacology departments in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. After completing her research she returned back to the United States 1n 1957, Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee accredited Medical School in the nation offered her appointment position as assistant professor of pharmacology she accepted. She was met with a lot of skepticism from the staff but with her vision and passion, Delores proved herself as a woman of color. She became a valued and respected member of the faculty. In 1967 she was promoted to associate professor, and ten years later she became head of the college’s department of microbiology. She has since served also as Meharrys foreign student advisor and its liaison for international activities to the Association of American Medical Colleges. She was visiting assistant professor at the Einstein College of Medicine in New York City from 1959 to 1962 and was a recipient of the Lederle Faculty Award from 1963 to 1966. Shockley is married to William Shockley, a microbiologist whom she met at Meharry, and has four children. In 1988 Dolores Cooper Shockley was appointed acting chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Meharry and in 1994 was made permanent chair making this the First and the only time that African-American women held this chair in the nation. Her husband passed away after 43 years together. Delores is also related to Fred Cooper, Co-founder of the Purdue Society of Black Engineers, and Michelle Cooper, the first female National Treasurer of the National Society of Black Engineers. Delores is a participant in LINKS a national organization that encourages young girls to pursue the field of science. In her home church, she tutors and mentors children as a service to give back. Dolores’s main research is drug abuse. As she has stated in interviews, She has been working with agents called pharmacotherapies for combating acute and chronic stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines. In one of her discoveries, she made a group of drugs called Ca++ channel blockers. The agents have the potential for treating patients with cocaine dependency and addicts who overdose and are taken to an ER. She found that there is a certain benefit but a high dosage of these agents can become toxic. Other labs have confirmed her team’s findings as well. Another area of her interest is to study more on the reaction of cocaine to the brain’s neurotransmitters. Professor Dolores Cooper Shockley has served on numerous national committees including NIH(The National Institutes of Health ), NSF ( National Science Foundation ), NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission ), and FDA ( Food Drug Administration ) Committees. She has held offices at the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). The Society established a travel Award in her honor for students to attend the national meeting for Experimental Biology. The Dolores C. Shockley Lectureship and Mentoring Award was inaugurated at the School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University in 2009.