Judith Vick, MD, MPH, is a geriatrician at Yale School of Medicine with a blossoming research career in addition to her clinical duties. Her path to academic medicine was circuitous and enriched with experiences beyond the confines of basic science and clinical medicine.
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Vick is the daughter of an art historian and a computer scientist. She migrated to Manhattan, where she completed her undergraduate degree in comparative literature at Barnard College. She was also interested in science and people, so completing the pre-medical requirements “seemed like a good idea,” she explained. Given her parents’ career paths, combining the humanities with STEM studies was not so foreign.
After college, Vick stayed at Barnard, where she worked full time for the Writing Fellows Program for three years. At this point, she became interested in communication as a field. “I loved my job but felt I needed more,” she said.
She wasn't particularly excited by the idea of medical school yet, so she moved to Boston and worked as a research assistant at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in collaboration with Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Called the Serious Illness Care Program, the research project aimed to understand the role of serious illness conversations in clinical decision-making. The trial was ultimately published in JAMA Internal Medicine and helped guide Vick’s career toward clinical medicine, communication, and complex, collaborative decision-making.
If you design a project for the most complex patient population, you’ll make discoveries for everyone.
Judith Vick, MD, MPH
In 2013, Vick returned to Baltimore to attend medical school at Johns Hopkins. After her second year of medical school, Vick’s mother suffered from a spontaneous brain bleed. Vick became deeply involved in her mother’s care and the process of shared decision-making of complex medical issues. Vick took a year away from her formal medical school curriculum to care for her mother, who she said has been a "huge teacher" to her. During that year, Vick started working with a gerontologist at Hopkins who focused on care delivery for older adults with a specific focus on adult caregivers.
Vick continued working in this area for her MPH as well. After her residency in internal medicine at Hopkins, she completed a health services research fellowship at Duke as part of the National Clinician Scholars Program.
Vick came to Yale in 2024 as an instructor in the Section of Geriatrics. She is currently working on various grant applications proposing to use the science of teamwork—a field of study in organizational science and social psychology—to study the challenges of engaging patients and families in shared decision-making. This project seeks to better understand how family members affect the decision-making process for patients. Vick’s work focuses on older adults with cognitive impairment and dementia, which presents challenges, but she doesn’t shy away from complex questions.
“If you design a project for the most complex patient population, you’ll make discoveries for everyone,” she said.
The project is unique in that it requires intense collaboration. Vick works with colleagues and mentors from the School of Management, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, and School of Medicine. “Yale is a true university experience with all these different strengths at our disposal,” she said.
Vick studies the science, art, ethics, and utility of shared decision-making, the culmination of her many life experiences. “The way I think about shared decision-making stems from my time as a writing fellow at Barnard—the student and the writing tutor are both themselves experts and bring a lot to the table to make decisions together,” she said.
Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Internal Medicine Section of Geriatrics strives to improve the health of older adults by providing exceptional patient care, training future leaders and innovators in aging, and engaging in cutting-edge research. To learn more about their mission, visit Geriatrics.