Cognitive neuroscientist, clinical trialist, and author. Former Harvard Medical School faculty and founder of the CARE Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Writing about what's broken in health science — and what communities are building in its place.
Jonathan Jackson spent fifteen years building the kind of career academic science rewards — faculty appointments, federal grants, a research center directorship at one of the world's most prestigious hospitals. He founded the CARE Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, the first center in MGH's history directed by a scientist of his background, and won the NIH Director's Pioneer Award for work reimagining how clinical research reaches the communities it claims to serve.
Along the way, he discovered something uncomfortable: the same system that elevated his work was structurally incapable of producing the science those communities actually needed. The machinery wasn't broken. It was working exactly as designed — and that was the problem.
He's now writing about what he found, and what he thinks comes next.
Part memoir, part structural argument, Science's Second Act tells the story of a scientist who scaled the institutions of academic medicine — from a neurology department to a cancer center to national research policy — and discovered that each promotion moved him further from the communities whose health he was trying to improve. The rooms got grander and sparser. He was locked in until he was alone atop the tower.
The book introduces a portable framework — tower, garden, wild type, ground truth, and error term — for understanding why health science systematically erases the variation it needs to see, and proposes community-governed "local science" as the structural alternative. It's the first trade book to bridge the "science is broken" literature with the "race and medicine" literature, connecting the replication crisis to the equity crisis as symptoms of the same underlying design.
Narrative nonfiction for readers of Ed Yong, Atul Gawande, and Siddhartha Mukherjee — with the structural ambition of a framework book and the intimacy of a memoir written from the middle of the story, not the end.
Over 350 invited lectures at academic medical centers, federal agencies, and research conferences — including recurring appearances at STAT News live events. Audiences range from 50-person departmental seminars to 500+ plenary sessions.
NIH Director's Pioneer Award recipient. Former faculty at Harvard Medical School. Investigator in the All of Us Research Program. Published in peer-reviewed journals on health equity, cognitive aging, and clinical trial design.
Midbrain — a Substack exploring the science of middle sizes: the space between molecules and populations where health actually happens, and where the interesting questions live.
Forthcoming, 2026
Dispatches on community science, the structure of health research, and the science of middle sizes.
The study that started the conversation — documenting systematic exclusion in the research meant to help everyone.
For speaking inquiries, press, or to discuss the book:
jonathan@jonathanjacksonphd.com