Dr. Shirley Rollinson, assistant professor of religion at Eastern New Mexico University, grew up in Britain, where many of her favorite childhood memories were made.

She enjoyed feeding bread to the swans in Stratford-on-Avon, England, along the river. She remembers getting bitten on the hand by a swan after holding onto the bread too long.

In adulthood, she took up the hobby of figure skating.

“I’m not going to be much good at this, but let’s try it,” she thought.

It came fairly easily to her. She advanced quickly with the help of her trainer, who “was actually not first in the world professional skating championships, but he was amongst the first four or five.” His strong skating enabled her to become a strong skater as well.

Dr. Rollinson also has a passion for music. She wanted to pursue it as a career when she was younger, but now she is glad she didn’t. She did, however, return to music as a hobby, and earned a bachelor’s degree in music from ENMU.

“If I were to have changed my life the way I thought I wanted, then it would probably have turned out worse,” she said. “Quite often things happened and I would think, ‘I wish this hadn’t happened,’ but then I would find that it worked out better that way than if I had chosen the way I thought would be good.”

Though she would have liked to go to medical school, she couldn’t because that involved full-time study, and she had to work her way through college. So she studied part-time and earned an honors degree in chemistry, physics and math from London University.

After her bachelor’s degree, she started doctoral research on some potential carcinogens. One of the requirements for doctoral students was that they teach several classes. She found that she liked teaching, so she took courses at a teachers’ college and earned a diploma in education. She decided that she wanted a career where she could teach, in addition to conducting research.

After her doctorate she moved to Aberdeen University, in the north of Scotland, for three years of teaching and research on insect pigments. She worked with some of the early computers, and learned to program with 5-hole paper tape, when a “short” program might well run for 27 hours.

She wanted to move into the newly opening field of biophysics (this was before there was such a term as molecular biology), and moved to Birkbeck College, London University–in the labs where Rosalind Franklin had worked after she made the X-Ray photos used by Crick and Watson in the helix break-through for DNA. She found that she had “green fingers” for growing crystals of proteins, antibiotics, and other biologicals for X-Ray crystallography.

After a couple of years, she was invited to join a new research group which was being formed at the Max Plank Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. While the group was being formed, she moved to the Medical Research Group Labs in Cambridge, to crystallize t-RNA for X-Ray studies. She still remembers the weekend when she fished a dripping photo out of the final rinse, and saw the pattern of spots with a nice distinctive “Helix Cross,” and knew that she had true crystals of a nucleic acid–the first in the world. The only others around the lab that day were Aaron Klug, John Finch, Francis Crick and Dr. Rollinson. They had a party in Aaron’s office.

“It was a great feeling when got we got the crystals of t-RNA, the first true crystals of a nucleic acid,” she said. Dr. Rollinson considers that her greatest accomplishment.

She moved with the biophysics team to the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, where she continued her research in molecular biology. While in Heidelberg, she helped to start an English-speaking church, and it was in that church that she met her future husband, John Rollinson.

Dr. Rollinson came to the USA to marry her husband, and when he retired from the military they both attended seminary and earned M.Div. degrees. Her husband, the Rev. John Rollinson, is a Resource Faculty member at ENMU who sometimes teaches religion courses. At seminary she learned both Greek and Hebrew, and took further courses in both languages.

After seminary, the Rollinsons moved to Clovis, California, where she taught physics and chemistry at Fresno State University, and science, Greek and Hebrew at West Coast Christian College.

From California, the Rollinsons moved to Houston, Texas, where she worked as a hospital chaplain for several years. Then they moved to Clovis, New Mexico, and she came to ENMU to teach Greek and religion courses.

“The more I taught the more I liked it,” she said.

Dr. Rollinson likes ENMU for the “nice, small classes” and “interested students.” She enjoys the opportunity to help her students succeed individually, as opposed to larger universities where students would “fall through the cracks.”

She said, “Here at Eastern we say, ‘If that’s what you want to do, we’ll help you.’ Eastern is a very good place to be.”

She has accomplished much in her lifetime, and encourages students to do the same, living out their dreams.

“Just go for it,” she said. “Be prepared to take risks, but prepare, and prepare well. Don’t be afraid of hard work. It’s going to be competitive. You’ll win some and lose some. If you lose, pick yourself back up and get going.”