A native of Great Britain and a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Dr. Ed Jackson emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he completed a master's degree at the University of Calgary (1970) and a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto (1974). He began his teaching career at the University of Toronto in 1974 and moved to the University of Alberta in 1975, where he is now Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

His research interests have focused upon a variety of topics related to leisure and recreation, including the relationship between outdoor recreation participation and attitudes to the natural environment, satisfaction in outdoor recreation, and conflict. In recent years he has concentrated largely on constraints to leisure participation and enjoyment, an area in which he has published more than twenty journal articles and several contract reports for the Alberta government.

He co-edited (with fellow Academy member Thomas L. Burton) and wrote portions of the 1989 text, Understanding Leisure and Recreation: Mapping the Past, Charting the Future, which assessed the then-current state of knowledge in leisure studies and provided a framework for the next decade of research. A similar but more ambitious book (also co-edited with Tim Burton) is Leisure Studies: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century (Venture Publishing, Inc., 1999), which includes contributions from about 40 leisure scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, many of them members of the Academy.

Dr. Jackson has recently completed editing a new book, Constraints to Leisure, due to be published by Venture in 2005.

He was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Leisure Research from 1988 to 1995, Secretary of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies (CALS) for two three-year terms (1987-1993), and President of CALS for 1996 to 1999. He received both the Allen V. Sapora Research Award and NRPA's Roosevelt Research Award in 1995. He was President of the Academy for 1995-1996.

Dr. Jackson is currently serving as Project Director of the World Leisure Consensus Project on Leisure and the Quality of Life.

Dr. Jackson maintains the websites for the Academy of Leisure Sciences and CALS (Canadian Association for Leisure Studies), two jazz websites (The Big Chris Barber Band and Sweet Papa Lowdown), and several websites about Iceland, including A Collection of Icelandic Photographs and Travels in 19th Century Iceland.