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 currently the president for the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Vicki is married to a lovely endocrinologist named Phil who has a special love for 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.
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Dr. Tulsky is the Poorvu Jaffe Chair, Department of Supportive Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Chief, Division of Palliative Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tulsky has published widely in the areas of clinician-patient communication and quality of life in serious illness, particularly for patients with advanced cancer. His work has been recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2002), the Award for Research Excellence from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (2006), the George L. Engel Award from the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare (2013), and the American Cancer Society Pathfinder in Palliative Care award (2014). In 2017, he was named a Hospice and Palliative Medicine Visionary by AAHPM.
He serves on the Board of the Greenwall Foundation (Chair, 2018-2023), Chair of the National Palliative Care Research Center Scientific Advisory Council, and from 2016-22 was Co-Chair of the Roundtable on Quality Care in Serious Illness of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. He is a Founding Director of VitalTalk (www.vitaltalk.org), a non-profit devoted to communication skills teaching and promotes a vision that every seriously ill patient will be surrounded by clinicians who can speak about what matters most and match care to values