Description of Clinical Expertise

Dr. Christina Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in open skull base surgery, minimally invasive surgery, endoscopic skull base and pituitary surgery, and complex brain tumor surgery. Her clinical expertise is in the treatment of benign and malignant brain tumors with special interest in skull base tumors include pituitary adenomas, meningiomas, craniopharyngiomas, chordomas, chondrosarcomas, schwannomas, and esthesioneuroblastomas.

Dr. Jackson received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School prior to completing her neurosurgery residency at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She then completed a dedicated fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center focusing on endoscopic endonasal and open skull base surgical techniques. Dr. Jackson is uniquely trained in both open and endoscopic endonasal skull base approaches and aims to select the most effective and less invasive approach to each individual patient.

Description of Research Expertise

The focus of our lab’s research is at the intersection of immunology, metabolism, and brain tumor biology. The primary goal of our translational research is to understand mechanisms of immune evasion by primary malignant brain tumors and skull base tumors to generate novel immune-based therapies. We utilize a combination of high-dimensional single cell immune and genomic profiling, metabolomics, and advanced tumor organoid and mouse models, to 1) understand the role of myeloid derived suppressor cells in promoting tumor growth and T cell dysfunction, 2) elucidate the mechanisms of tumor-specific T cell exhaustion and clonal lineage of dysfunction T cells, and 3) understand how metabolic networks control immune cell function within the tumor microenvironment.