Jerlando F. L. Jackson is the Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and the Director and Chief Research Scientist of Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As Director of the Wei LAB, he is responsible for managing the Innovation Incubator (I2), National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics (NSIA), and the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education. Dr. Jackson is working to advance the Wei LAB’s Translational and Commercialization Division, which fosters new education products and ventures based on the LAB’s scientific and intellectual property assets stewardship™. These efforts have led to two new university start-up enterprises: Compete Brands LLC and Beyond the Game™ (BTG) Solutions LLC. Prior to establishing the Wei LAB in 2010, he served as founding Executive Director of the Center for African American Research and Policy (CAARP), which is a nonpartisan, independent, nonprofit research organization. CAARP was founded in 2005 as part of his faculty work and professional service obligations, and was spun-out in 2007 as a 501(c) (3).
His central research interest is organizational science in higher education, with a special interest in hiring practices, career mobility, workforce diversity, and workplace discrimination. He also has a portfolio of research focused on interventions designed to broaden participation for underrepresented groups in the scientific workforce. He is credited with over 100 publications that appear in high-impact journals that include Research in Higher Education, IEEE Computer, American Behavioral Scientist, Teachers College Record, Review of Higher Education, and West’s Educational Law Reporter. His books include Measuring Glass Ceiling Effects: Opportunities and Challenges for Jossey Bass (2014), Introduction to American Higher Education for Routledge (2010), Ethnic and Racial Administrative Diversity: Understanding Work Life Realities and Experiences in Higher Education for Jossey Bass (2009); Strengthening the African American Educational Pipeline: Informing Research, Policy, and Practice for SUNY-Albany Press (2007); and Toward Administrative Reawakening: Creating and Maintaining Safe College Campuses for Stylus Publishing (2007). Dr. Jackson has delivered over 200 research papers and keynote addresses globally.
