Stephen T Jackson, Ph.D.

Stephen T. Jackson is Senior Advisor on Biodiversity and Climate Change. Prior to this role, he served as Director of the Southwest and South Central Climate Adaptation Science Centers, partnerships between the U.S. Geological Survey and multi-university consortia respectively led by the University of Arizona and the University of Oklahoma. In this position, he worked to foster effective engagement between researchers and resource-management decision-makers. He is also Adjunct Professor of Geosciences and of Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Arizona. Before joining USGS in 2012, he was at the University of Wyoming, where he was founding Director of the Program in Ecology and is now Professor Emeritus of Botany.

Jackson is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science, the Advisory Editorial Board for Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and the Editorial Advisory Board for The Holocene, and has previously served on editorial boards for Ecology, Ecology Letters, Frontiers in Ecology & Environment, Ecological Monographs, Ecosystems, Journal of Vegetation Science, Diversity & Distributions, Wetlands, and New Phytologist.  He is a past Fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program (2006), a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford (2012), and a Scholar in Residence at the Ucross Foundation (2012).  He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009) and the Ecological Society of America (2014). Jackson was awarded the 2011 George Duke Humphrey Distinguished Faculty Medal from the University of Wyoming, and the 2015 Excellence in Leadership Award from the U.S. Geological Survey. He was listed as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2016, 2017, and 2019. 

Jackson’s research has focused on using the past 25,000 years of earth history as a source of natural experiments to explore ecological responses to environmental changes of various kinds, rates, and magnitudes. His interests also include the history of science, and he has edited two English translations of classic works by Alexander von Humboldt, with a third nearing completion.