Education
Jacobson attended Warren Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his Bachelor of Surgery in Chemistry in 1980 from Butler University also in Indianapolis, Indiana. He then attended the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago receiving his Doctor of Medicine in 1984. He then spent five years in the New Haven, Connecticut area. There he completed his internship in pediatrics, became chief resident of the Pediatric Primary Care Center and finished his three year residency at the Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Jacobson also completed a two year fellowship at the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program in clinical epidemiology at Yale University before accepting a position at the.
Career
He is the former chair of the Department of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the and a full professor of pediatrics at the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota. His research area is in vaccinology, with a focus on delivery, effectiveness and adverse consequences. Jacobson co-leads the Vaccine Research Group at the with Greg Poland. He is also involved with the Clinical Research Training Program in the Mayo Medical School, where he concentrates on teaching evidence-based medicine.
From 2012, he has been the president of the Minnesota chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
He is also a fellow of the Academy. Jacobson arrived in Rochester, Minnesota in 1989 to practice pediatrics and perform vaccine research at the Since then, he has published over 125 research papers in academic and medical journals.
Immunization and epidemiology continue to be a focus in his current research which includes the genetic basis for vaccine response towards measles, mumps and rubella. His research group also focuses on anthrax and smallpox vaccines, which are directed against bioterrorism.
In 2000, he became the interim chair of the Department of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine which includes the Mayo Eugenio Litta Children"s Hospital and then in 2001 became the permanent chairman
In 2010, he stepped down as chair of the department to lead the Employee and Community Health (ECH) Research Initiative, which focuses on population-based interventions to improve patients" health. From this initiative, he has moved on to become the medical director of the Population Health Science Program of the Robert Doctorate. and Patricia East. Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery, which supports research and education regarding community health best practices. He helped found the Population Health Sciences Scholars Program at the, which supports scholars who study community health.
Membership
He still regularly sees young patients as a member of the Division of Community Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
