Vicki Jackson, MD, MPH, has been named chief and chair of the department of medicine as of September 2, 2025. Dr. Jackson joins our community from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she has served with dis-tinction for more than two decades, most recently as the Blum Family Endowed Chair in Palliative Care and the chief of the division of palliative care and geriatric medicine. Jackson also was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, codirector of the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care, and founding director for the Harvard Palliative Medicine Fellowship.

A nationally recognized leader in pallia-tive care, Jackson received Harvard Medical School’s prestigious A. Clifford Barger mentoring award in 2019. She is a coinvestigator and mentor on numerous studies funded through the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute investigating the effect of early, integrated palliative care for patients with advanced cancer. She also coauthored the books Living with Cancer: A Step-by-Step Guide for Coping Medically and Emotionally with a Serious Diagnosis and What’s in
the Syringe? Principles of Early Integrated Palliative Care.

Jackson fulfilled her residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Cambridge Hospital and received training in research methods through the Harvard general medicine fellowship. She earned a master’s in public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and completed training in palliative care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The school is grateful to Sushrut Waikar, MD, for leading the department as interim chief and chair while continuing in his role as section chief of nephrology.