Dr. Nancy Ewald Jackson is emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at The University of Iowa. She received her doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Washington in 1975.

Dr. Jackson's research in the 1970's and 1980's focused primarily on the development of intellectual giftedness and precocious reading acquisition. More recently, she has studied how the reading process differs for first- and second-language readers and how well university students can read if their ability to "sound out" words is poor. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Education, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Jackson has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited books. Her most recent book, co-authored by Max Coltheart, is Routes to Reading Success and Failure: Toward an Integrated Cognitive Psychology of Atypical Reading.