Dr. Jacobs is a professor in Biomedical  Informatics and Medical Education and the Director of Graduate Medical Education. She also serves as a statistical Consultant for the HPD Statistical Consulting Center and Institutional Review Board (IRB) College Representative. Dr. Jacobs completed her doctoral training in social welfare at the FIU under a two-year research fellowship and has earned master’s degrees in biomedical informatics, public health, and social work, a bachelor’s degree in community health education and promotion, and a specialist degree in complementary alternative medicine. Dr. Jacobs is an internationally known researcher whose work includes 225 scholarly works including more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on various topics as well as two book chapters on evidence-based practice. She has served as a principal investigator, co-investigator, and statistical analyst with extensive experience in developing or being part of the development/implementation of several NIH- and CDC-funded research projects involving technology-driven platforms addressing health literacy, chronic disease self-management, and HIV. She has served on numerous Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute (PCORI) and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) scientific review committees and peer-review scientific editorial boards. Additionally, she served as a reviewer for the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). She has a varied research background in health informatics and eHealth, behavioral health, medical education, public health, pharmacy education, and the social sciences. She currently serves as co-investigator on a multi-year project supported by the US National Institutes of Health to create health literacy tools to help people find, understand, and use information to maintain and improve their health. Her research focus has recently pivoted to medical education research, specifically to assess and reform the culture underlying medical education vis a vis undergraduate and graduate research training.