Gretchen Purcell Jackson, MD, PhD, FACS, FACMI, FAMIA

Gretchen Purcell Jackson, MD, PhD, FACS, FACMI, FAMIA is Vice President and Scientific Medical Officer at Intuitive Surgical and an Associate Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is an internationally recognized biomedical informatician and accomplished clinical surgeon with over 30 years of contributions to informatics research, innovations in health information technologies, and surgical science.

Dr. Jackson earned her BS (Electrical Engineering and Biological Sciences), MD, and PhD in Medical Informatics at Stanford University. She trained in general surgery at Duke University Medical Center (1997-2003) and pediatric surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and she is board certified in general surgery, pediatric surgery, and clinical informatics. After surgical training, Dr. Jackson spent 12 years as an academic clinician scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she had a busy surgical practice and received extramural funding from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) R01 and R18 grants focused on consumer health informatics. She served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University and was a co-Principal Investigator for Vanderbilt’s National Library of Medicine T15 Training Grant in Biomedical Informatics.

In 2018, Dr. Jackson joined IBM Watson Health as Chief Science Officer. In this role, she developed the scientific strategy for Watson Health solutions and grew a team scientists to conduct studies with clients and academic partners across the world. In 2021, she took on the role of Chief Health and Science Officer, overseeing a team that provided multidisciplinary clinical, technical, and scientific expertise for Watson Health’s business strategy, sales, consulting, research, and product design and development.  She began her current role at Intuitive Surgical in 2022, and her team is focused on generating scientific evidence about the performance and impact of digital solutions for minimally-invasive surgery, including articial intelligence and clinical decision-support tools. Dr. Jackson still sees patients and practices pediatric surgery at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Jackson is Past President and Past Chair of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) (2022-2023) and an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI) and the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). She  also an elected member of the Society for University Surgeons, the Southern Surgical Association, and the American Surgical Association. Dr. Jackson has served three terms as a member of the Board of Governors for the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), and she has chaired informatics and/or technology committees at the American College of Surgeons, Association for Academic Surgery, and American Pediatric Surgical Association, as well as the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. She is a member of the editorial board of the British Medical Journal and an associate editor of Applied Clinical Informatics and JAMIA Open. She has previously served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Medical Informatics and Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 

Patient Care Emphasis

General and thoracic pediatric surgery, minimally-invasive surgery.

Education

• Ph.D., Medical Information Sciences, Stanford University, 1997
• M.D., Stanford University, 1996
• B.A.,  Electrical Engineering and Biological Sciences, Stanford University

Postgraduate Training

• Intern & Resident, General Surgery, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, 1997-2003
• Fellow, Pediatric Surgery, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 2004-06

Dr. Jackson has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has made numerous scientific presentations. Review some of her abstracts on PubMed.