Skyler Jackson, PhD

Dr. Skyler Jackson (he/him) conducts research illuminating how and why individuals’ social identities (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation) shape their everyday lives and influence health and well-being. In particular, he is interested in how experiences of stigma, if not adequately coped with, interfere with psychological functioning and contribute to health disparities. He serves as the inaugural Associate Director of Yale’s LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative and is a faculty affiliate of Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA).

Drawing on a broad range of methodological approaches, Dr. Jackson’s current projects examine complex, understudied manifestations of stigma among sexual, racial, and gender minority populations, including (a) intersectional stress among individuals holding multiple marginalized identities (e.g., LGBTQ+ people of color) and (b) border identity stress among people whose identities (e.g., multiracial, bisexual, gender nonbinary) challenge, span, or defy conventional forms of binary social categorization (e.g., Black/White, gay/straight, man/woman). Increasingly, Dr. Jackson’s work has focused on the development of culturally attuned stigma-coping interventions to address the intersectional determinants of health among multiply marginalized populations.

Dr. Jackson’s work has been supported by several competitive research grants and awards, including an NIMH K01 Career Development Award titled “Intersectional stigma, mental health, and HIV risk among US GBM of color” (1K01MH122316-01A1) and an NIMH R01 research grant titled “Validating a Unified Model of Border Identity Stress, HIV Risk, and Mental Health Across Three U.S. Health Disparity Populations” (1R01MH133543-01).