These are excerpts from the Original article by Jackie Torok at NC A&T University.
EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (April 26, 2023) – The Triad Business Journal has named Tonya Smith-Jackson, Ph.D., provost and executive vice chancellor of Academic Affairs at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, among its 2023 Outstanding Women in Business.
Smith-Jackson, a research engineer with extensive academic leadership experience, was named in September 2022 to serve permanently in her current role, which she held on an interim basis for 10 months.
As Academic Affairs leader, Smith-Jackson oversees more than 800 faculty, 10 deans and 41 department chairs, as well as information technology, student affairs and research.
Smith-Jackson also chairs the university’s Increasing Research Capacity Task Force, charged with transitioning A&T from an R2, high research activity, to R1, very high research activity, under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Smith-Jackson originally joined A&T in 2013 as a professor and chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and founder/director of the Human Factors Analytics Laboratory. She went on to serve as founder and co-director of the Cyber-Human Analytics Research for the Internet-of-Things Laboratory, director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Identity Sciences and graduate program director for Industrial and Systems Engineering.
In 2018, Smith-Jackson served at the National Science Foundation for a year as program director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate in the Cyber-Human Systems Program before returning to A&T in the role of interim director for the Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity, Research, Education and Outreach.
Smith-Jackson then went on to serve as A&T’s senior vice provost for Academic Affairs. During her time in that role, Gov. Roy Cooper named her to the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Performance Management in 2021, a year after he appointed her to the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Board of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Smith-Jackson earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and M.S. in interdisciplinary psychology/ergonomics and industrial engineering and Ph.D. in psychology/ergonomics from North Carolina State University.
She received the 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Award from the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Society International in recognition and appreciation of her achievements, contributions, dedication and lifelong achievement in the industrial engineering and operations management profession.