Gretchen Jackson, MD, PhD
Gretchen is the Vice President and Chief Science Officer at IBM Watson Health and an Associate Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is an internationally recognized informatician and accomplished clinical surgeon with over 25 years of contributions to informatics research, innovations in health information technologies, and surgical science. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).
Gretchen earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Biological Sciences, M.D., and Ph.D. in Medical Informatics at Stanford University. She is board certified in general and pediatric surgery, and in 2014, she joined the first class of 455 diplomats who became board certified in the new specialty of Clinical Informatics. She sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and International Journal of Medical Informatics, and she is an associate editor of Applied Clinical Informatics and JAMIA Open. Gretchen’s current research is focused on evaluating clinical decision support systems and empowering patients and families through health information technologies. Prior to joining Watson Health, Dr. Jackson was the Director of Graduate Studies and a co-Principal Investigator for Vanderbilt’s National Library of Medicine T15 Training Grant in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. She has been the principal investigator of a grant from the Agency for Health Research and Quality for a project studying of the information needs of pregnant women and their caregivers to inform the design of health information technologies. She has been a member of the Board of Governors for the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), and has chaired informatics committees at the American College of Surgeons, Association for Academic Surgery, and American Pediatric Surgical Association. She has also chaired the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.