When gold medalist Erin Jackson laces up her skates and puts on her game face for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, her stateside cheering squad will include many rowdy reptiles.
The Ocala-bred speedskater is also a Gator engineer who graduated with honors from the Department of Materials Science & Engineering in 2015.
“Erin is someone UF should be proud of,” said Professor Nancy Ruzycki, Ph.D., master lecturer and MSE’s director of undergraduate laboratories.
Make no mistake, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering is proud of Jackson. Professors are certified fans who plan to go berserk when their Gator engineer takes to the ice to defend her gold medal. Professors remember Jackson as an ambitious student who maintained exceptional grades while darting back and forth to Ocala for training.
“Erin Jackson was an outstanding student,” said MSE Professor Emeritus John J. Mecholsky, Jr., Ph.D. “She was a very careful experimenter and a delight to work with. She was always smiling and very eager to accomplish any given task, difficult or not.”
“She was very driven. At the time, she was competing at an elite level in inline skating and working diligently to balance that with being a high-performing student in a rigorous curriculum,” noted Jennifer Andrew, the associate dean for Research and Innovation at the College of Engineering, as well as the MSE Margaret A. Ross professor.
Seven years after Jackson graduated, she became the first Black American woman to win an Olympic speed skating medal and the first Black woman to win an individual Winter Olympic gold. She is set to compete in the women’s 1000-meter race on Monday, Feb. 9, and the women’s 500-meter on Sunday, Feb. 15.
During the opening ceremonies, Jackson will carry the American flag for Team USA, a substantial honor as picked by the United States National Olympic Committee. No stranger to raising Olympic athletes, Gator Nation will be watching closely. And loudly.
“I watched her in the last Olympics when she won gold,” Mecholsky recalled. “It was very exciting. I am a very proud academic father.”
As a University of Florida engineering student, Jackson displayed Olympic-level discipline; she was well organized and completed everything on time.
“I think she developed the skills of organization and timeliness from her love of athletics,” Mecholsky said. “Her senior thesis work — The Effect of Controlled Crack Length on the Fracture Mechanics of Y-TZP — was outstanding and will contribute to a journal publication.”
She was a solid engineer, a problem-solver who, Ruzycki recalled, brought her broken shoe to the failure-analysis lab one day to determine its failure: the shoe’s glue, Jackson concluded, could not handle the forces on the strap. She had an analytic approach and a penchant for asking, “Why?”
“Erin took this approach to her sport,” Ruzycki said. “She was always talking about how she was working with her coach to improve her times and performance metrics. Erin loved materials science and was dedicated to finishing her degree, but sport was her first love. Her passion for performance was evident, even as an undergraduate.”
MSE Distinguished Professor and Fredrick N. Rhines Professor Kevin Jones remembered Jackson as very humble.
“She easily excelled in a difficult class, so she was obviously very smart,” Jones recalled. “She wasn’t cocky, but she was confident. I asked if she was surprised she won, and she said not really. She said as long as she didn’t make any mistakes, she believed she would win, which is the kind of confidence she possesses and is probably common to most world champions. Just a really neat kid.”
After graduation, Jackson stayed in touch, Ruzycki said, and her MSE peer cohort supported her in her early years of Olympic preparation.
“I still have a T-shirt I bought to help support Erin in her first Olympics and will proudly wear it next week for this new challenge,” Ruzycki said. “Erin is a great role model to young people everywhere in her perseverance, resilience, rising to a challenge and pivoting to achieve greater success.”
In 2023, Jackson returned to UF to speak at the university-wide spring commencement.
Dream big, execute small.
Break it down into what needs to happen right now, in tiny, bite-sized pieces, to take one step, one stride toward that goal. If you do that, over and over and over again, I believe it will lead you to your own golden moment.
– Erin Jackson, Olympian and UF Engineering alumnus