Fatimah Jackson

Professor, Department of Biology

Director of the W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory

Howard University

Since receiving her Ph.D. in 1981, Dr. Jackson has published more than 100 primary research articles. What is most striking in Dr. Jackson's work is the evolution of her research throughout her career. Grounded in an emerging molecular anthropology, Dr. Jackson's earliest work focused on the ways in which molecular evidence can reveal and retrace complex patterns of ancestry, with a particular focus on African diasporic populations in which historical documentation is often absent. Through this line of research, Dr. Jackson has provided a critical gaze on anthropology's own history of "race science" and classification. Dr. Jackson has been on the leading edge, going back nearly two decades, of biological anthropologists who have cast a much-needed skeptical eye towards the possibilities as well as perils of genetic data in the analysis and classification of human variation. As Dr. Jackson's career continued to develop, she brought her keen perspective on issues related to the co-variants of health and chronic disease. As the director of the W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory, at Howard University, Dr. Jackson has been able to couple her own molecular interests with studies of human skeletal material. This work has opened the door to multidisciplinary efforts to bring new light on populations that have, within the history of our discipline, been treated more as objects and standards than as people and communities. Dr. Jackson's informed research into these topics has provided a much- needed and indelible integrity to our discipline.

More recently, Dr. Jackson's creative intellect has found itself focused on looking at plant and human co-evolutionary interactions. Again, not by chance, Dr. Jackson's work in this area has been at the vanguard, preceding new awareness of the importance of plants in our evolutionary past .

Dr. Jackson has produced a deeply meaningful body of scholarly work across a range of topics seldom matched within our field. She is a true trailblazer within the field.