Margo Jackson

Margo Jackson is an American psychologist, educator and author. She is currently a professor in the Master’s in counseling psychology program as well as the doctoral program of CLAIR (Contemporary Learning and Interdisciplinary Research), both at Fordham University in New York City.

Jackson completed her Baccalaureate studies in psychology and Spanish at Binghamton University. She pursued and completed her Master’s in Education in counseling and psychology with a specialty in student personnel and administrative services at State University of New York at Buffalo. She later gained a doctorate in counseling psychology from Stanford University. Her further professional post-doctoral fellowship experiences include; a postdoctoral psychology fellowship in clinical supervision at the Andrology Clinic of the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Palo Alto, California and a postdoctoral research fellowship in the School of Education within the Program for Complex Instruction at Stanford University.

Jackson has served at various times as the Chair of the Division of Psychological and Educational Services in the Graduate School of Education with Fordham University at the Lincoln Center Campus, New York City. Also within Fordham University, she has served as Director of Training of Counseling Psychology. Additionally, she has served, nationally, as the Chair of the Council of Counseling Psychology Training programs. She has taken on many roles and positions throughout her career such as in her work in community mental health, at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center, as the Director of a Career Development Center. She has been a career counselor, aided in employment development, been a counselor in Educational Opportunity Programs and co-founded a private practice, Career Counseling Associates. She mentors graduate students and promotes a scientific-practitioner; evidence-based approach to the helping professions as she models it herself with her own published research. Her research focus has been multicultural psychology as it applies to education, social work, community and employment settings. She has also done work to embed these multicultural perspectives in training, supervision and ethical professional aspects of counseling psychology. She has done extensive work, extending from the 1990s, on microaggressions. (hidden biases). She has focused her efforts on quantifying these micro-aggressions and reducing them with a realistic lens of what is currently the state of the “-isms” (racism, sexism, etc.) and the reality of hidden biases and their impacts. She also conducts workshops with middle-school aged students as well as graduate students to train them on Microagressions. Additionally, she has designed methods for handling and bringing awareness of the latter (confrontation method and stereotype reversal method) and has examined them through research for effectiveness in promoting the counselor-client relationship. She has also participated in and presented on microaggressions at the Racial Justice Teach-In at Fordham University in 2015. Her research endeavors have culminated in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project to develop a strength-based, culturally relevant, and psychometrically sound assessment for career development that had graduate students collaborate with middle school students from underrepresented groups in science, math and technology professions.

Jackson has written on multicultural awareness for the Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, including as co-editor of the 4th edition. In addition, she co-authored a qualitative paper that was published in Qualitative Psychology, titled: Racial microaggression experiences and coping strategies of Black women in corporate leadership.

Furthermore, she has contributed with her writing and has published across several more platforms, some of which include the Journal for Talent Development and Creativity; Training and Education in Professional Psychology; Counseling Psychologist; Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology; Journal of Career Assessment; Handbook of vocational psychology and Handbook of multicultural school psychology: An interdisciplinary perspective.