Dr. Jackson is the Blum Family Endowed Chair in Palliative Care and the Chief of the Division of Palliative Care and Geriatric Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.  She also serves as the Co-Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care. She was the founding Director for the Harvard Palliative Medicine Fellowship. She completed residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at The Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She pursued training in research methods through the Harvard General Medicine Fellowship and completed a Master’s in Public Health at The Harvard School of Public Health. She completed training in palliative care at The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  

Dr. Jackson is the Palliative Care lead investigator and mentor on numerous studies funded through NIH, NCI, and PCORI investigating the effect of early, integrated palliative care for patients with advanced cancer. In 2019, she was the recipient of the prestigious Harvard Medical School A. Clifford Barger mentoring award. She is the co-author of the book Living with Cancer: A step-by-step guide to coping medically and emotionally with a serious diagnosis, published by Johns Hopkins University Press and What’s in the syringe? Principles of early Integrated Palliative Care published by Oxford University Press. Nationally she has served as a member of the Board and secretary and is the immediate past president for the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Vicki is married to a lovely endocrinologist named Phil who is very fond of the adrenal gland. She has two college-age children, Hannah and Sam, and a golden retriever named Millie. She is originally from a small town in Northern Wisconsin.