A scholar, educator, and activist, Dr. Fleda Mask Jackson is President and CEO of MAJAICA, LLC, Professor of Applied Public Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Health, and senior scientist at the Atlanta Regional Health Forum.

With academic preparation in education, psychology and anthropology her works is aimed at advancing the well being of African American children, families, and communities that is informed by community-based, culturally sensitive research that can be translated into practice and policy.  In addition to her seminal work on the education of African American children, she has devoted her expertise to the study of the racial and gendered stress and its link to health disparities, particularly reproductive disparities for African American women. With major grant support from the CDC and the Ford Foundation, she led a research team whose efforts have produced an identity stress measure (Jackson, Hogue, Phillips Contextualized Stress) and an intervention model expressly designed to respond to the particular psychosocial risk of race and gender confronted by African American women. She was the Principal Investigator for a statewide assessment for Florida’s Women’s Health Initiative where the result indicates that women from diverse populations view stress as one of the leading causes of death. Her extensive work is informing state policies aimed at eliminating health disparities.

The author of numerous publications and presentations, Dr. Jackson has served as a consultant and advisor for a wide range of organizations that include the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the Center for Excellence in Women’s Health at the Harvard Medical School, The Ford Foundation (SisterSong), and the Rhea and Lawton Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies at the University of South Florida. Dr. Jackson serves as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Health Disparities for the Centers for Disease Control. She also is a Senior Fellow for the National Center for Health Behavioral Change.

The recipient of the Spelman College Alumnae Achievement Award in Health and Science and the Delta Award for Health Activism, the city of Atlanta honored her work by naming September 23rd, 2002 as Dr. Fleda Mask Jackson Day.  Dr Jackson and her research on stress will be one of the featured stories on a PBS series on social inequality and health disparities, “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick” scheduled to air on April 3, 2008 at 10 p.m.