She is currently the director of the Advanced Practice Pediatric Nursing program and is past director of the school-wide Primary Health Care program. In the Advanced Practice Pediatric Nursing program her primary teaching focus is on leadership development as advanced practice nurses and health care needs of children with chronic or disabling conditions. She practices and precepts students one day a week as a nurse practitioner at Valencia Health Services, the School of Nursing owned and operated pediatric practice in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. Professor Jackson is also interested in international work and spent six months in 1997 in England working at Oxford-Brookes University and consults on advanced practice pediatric nursing at multiple pediatric hospitals and schools of higher education across England and in Hong Kong. Ms. Jackson has done research on self-esteem in children with precocious puberty and subclinical vitamin A deficiency in toddler and preschool age children.
Current research is focused on role functions of pediatric nurse practitioners.
Education of pediatric nurse practitioners for children with special health care needs. Dr. Abbey Alkon is a nurse epidemiologist and Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing Department of Family Health Care Nursing. This study involves 4-9 year old children's physiologic responses to normative stressors as measures of children's individual responses to their environments. Other research studies include evaluation studies of interventions that affect young children attending childcare centers. A recently completed project was a CDC-funded violence prevention evaluation study for childcare teachers and parents.