Monica C. Jackson

Monica Christine Jackson is an American statistician and academic administrator, the deputy provost and dean of faculty at American University. Her research focuses on spatial statistics and disease monitoring, pertaining to the analysis of identifying cancer clusters and assessing global clustering trends.

Education and career

Jackson is African American, originally from Kansas City, Missouri, and has two brothers, one her twin. She loved mathematics from a very young age, and after growing bored with the public school mathematics curriculum available to her, transferred in middle school to a more demanding program at a Catholic girls' school, Notre Dame de Sion. She majored in mathematics at Clark Atlanta University, graduating in 1992, and continued there for a master's degree in 1994. She completed her Ph.D. in statistics in 2003 at the University of Maryland, College Park, with the dissertation Spatial Data Analysis for Discrete Data on a Lattice supervised by Estelle Russek-Cohen.
Postdoctoral research at Emory University led her to her focus on the spatial statistics of disease monitoring. She joined American University as an assistant professor of statistics in 2005. She earned tenure there as an associate professor in 2011. After becoming a full professor, and associate dean of undergraduate studies, she was appointed as deputy provost and dean of faculty in 2021.

Jackson is a coauthor of the book Elementary Statistics: A Guide to Data Analysis Using R.
Her research articles include: