Dr. Angela F. Cooke-Jackson is a Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Eastern Kentucky University. She comes to us from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she taught Public Speaking and Health Issues Among Women of Color at the University of New Mexico and TVI Community College. Dr. Cooke-Jackson received her Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Communication from Cedarville University, a Baptist liberal arts university in southwestern Ohio. She went on to acquire her Master of Arts degree from University of Dayton in Student Personnel Counseling in Higher Education. After the completion of her Masters she worked extensively in Academic Administrative positions on various campus like Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont and Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, Kentucky. She had a career shift in 1998 which, lead her to the University of Kentucky to work on her doctorate. She completed her Ph.D. in Health Communication with an emphasis in Behavioral Science from the University of Kentucky in the Spring of 2006.

Dr. Cooke-Jackson has been involved in issues of health disparity for a number of years. During her 4 years in Albuquerque, New Mexico not only did she teach at the university but she also worked as a Health Specialist contractor in conjunction with the New Mexico Department of Health and the Office of African American Affairs. Among these responsibilities one that was significant was the opportunity she had to collect data for the New Mexico Department of Health on the correlations of smoking cessation and type II diabetes among African American populations. She also received intensive training with the Catalyst Institute from the New Mexico Media Literacy Project, a program which sought to train individuals on how to integrate media literacy into classroom, organizations or various community programs. Outside of working with health disparities among people of color, Dr. Cooke-Jackson worked on various community projects specific to the Native and Hispanic communities.

Dr. Cooke-Jackson has trained extensively with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond www.pisab.org/. The People’s Institute which is recognized as one of the foremost anti-racism training and organizing institutions in the nation believes that effective community and institutional change happens when those leaders and lay members understand how race and racism function as a barrier to community self determination and self sufficiency.