Jane Blankenship won high science honors while at Oak Ridge High School before graduating in June 1958 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a B.S. in chemistry. She worked summers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where her father Dr. Forest F. Blankenship was a physical chemist, and then married Carl H. Gibson, a chemical engineer, and became employed as a spectroscopist for Lockheed Aircraft in Palo Alto, California.