Jameson was born in the Philippines. She completed her bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of the Philippines in 1958. She graduated magna cum laude. She moved to America for her graduate studies, earning a PhD as a Fulbright Program scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1963. Her graduate work involved the prediction of chemical shifts in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy under the supervision of Herbert S. Gutowsky. She was awarded the Eastman Award for the most outstanding chemistry graduate student. She completed postdoctoral studies with Martin Karplus at Columbia University. She mapped the NMR Chemical Shift and indirect coupling constants across the whole periodic table. She worked won the relationship between dihedral angle and spin-orbit coupling.