J. Zachary Jacobson
Northeast Regional Director
Senior Mathematician
Health Canada

A mathematician and cognitive psychologist, Zachary Jacobson is a senior mathematician with the Applied Research and Analysis Unit of Health Canada, consulting for the agency on mathematics and behavioral science. He received his undergraduate degree in physics and math from Dalhousie and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Queen's University, Jacobson served as an assistant professor of psychology there from 1974-77 and assistant professor of mathematics and statistics from 1977-79. He was a survey methodologist for Alberta Treasury from 1979-81, when be became director of Research, Planning and Systems. While with the Bureau of Management Consulting from 1981-02, Jacobson consulted on cognitive science and mathematics across the government of Canada. He has served as an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, a position he currently holds with Carleton University, where he is active in the Cognitive Science Program. His research interests include stochastic modeling of infectious disease outbreaks, temporal physics, neural networks, speech perception, color vision, cognitive visual masking and memory models. A Sigma Xi member since 1984, Jacobson is a past Ottawa Chapter president and program chair and served as a Northeast Regional Director from 1994-01. He has served as chair of the Sigma Xi Committee on Regions and president of the Sigma Xi Fund of Canada.