Shirley Chater

Shirley Sears Chater, born on 30 July 1932 in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, is an American nurse, educational administrator and government official. She received an undergraduate degree in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania, worked for a year at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London through an exchange program of the American Nurses Association, completed a master's degree in nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, and earned a doctorate in education from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. She was Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at San Francisco from 1977 to 1982, president of Texas Woman's University from 1986 to 1993, and the twelfth commissioner of the Social Security Administration from 1993 to 1997. Afterwards she helped the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation develop its Executive Nurse Fellows program, and the American Academy of Nursing named her a Living Legend in 2000.