Skyler Jackson, PhD

Dr. Skyler Jackson (he/him) conducts research focusing on the ways 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 an faculty affiliate of Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA).

Relying on a broad range of methodological approaches (e.g., microlongitudinal, experimental, qualitative), Dr. Jackson’s current projects examine complex, understudied manifestations of stigma across sexual, racial, and gender minority populations, including (a) intersectional stress among individuals holding multiple marginalized identities (e.g., LGBTQ+ people of color, Black women), and (b) border identity stress among populations holding identities that defy binary categorization (e.g., bisexuals, multiracial people, gender nonbinary individuals). Towards these goals, Dr. Jackson recently received an NIMH R01 Award entitled, “Validating a Unified Model of Border Identity Stress, HIV Risk, and Mental Health Across Three U.S. Health Disparity Populations” (1R01MH133543-01).

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. Supporting his research in this area, Dr. Jackson recently completed an NIMH K01 Career Development Award entitled, “Intersectional stigma, mental health, and HIV risk among US GBM of color” (1K01MH122316-01A1).