[2] Since 2013, Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working on Named Data Networking.

[16] Jacobson discussed his ideas on Named data networking (NDN), the focus of his work at PARC, in August 2006 as part of the Google Tech Talks.

[17][18] Van Jacobson is now working with the NDN Consortium funded by the National Science Foundation to explore and create the future of the internet.

Van Jacobson together with his colleague at LBL, Steven McCanne, won R&D Magazine's 1995 R&D 100 Award for development of a software toolpack that enables multiparty audio and visual conferencing via the MBone (Multicast Backbone).

[19] For his work, Jacobson received the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement "for contributions to protocol architecture and congestion control",[1] the 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award,[7] and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for his "contributions to network protocols, including multicasting and the control of congestion.