Navkiran “Kiran” K. Shokar, M.D., MPH

Navkiran “Kiran” K. Shokar, M.D., MPH, is chair of the Department of Population Health, a professor of population health and associate dean for Community Affairs at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin.

Prior to joining Dell Med, Shokar served as a tenured professor of family and community medicine and molecular and translational medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso (TTUHSC). She served as interim associate dean for clinical research, director for cancer prevention and control in the Center of Emphasis for Cancer, and vice chair for research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. Before going to El Paso, she spent 11 years as a faculty member at UTMB Galveston.

Shokar was born and raised in England, where she received her Master of Arts degree from Cambridge University and her medical degree from Oxford University Medical School. She completed family medicine residency training in the U.K. (Banbury, Oxfordshire) and in the U.S. (Houston, Texas), where she served as chief resident. She subsequently completed her Master of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health.

In more than 20 years in academic medicine, Shokar has worked as a clinician, educator and clinical researcher. Her research interests include interventions in cancer prevention and control, shared decision-making, and community-based research to address cancer health disparities among vulnerable, poor and underserved populations. She has developed innovative population health approaches to bridge the divide between the community, the health care delivery system and public health.

Shokar has received more than $25 million in research funding from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS), among others. She is well published, serves as a reviewer for many journals and served for six years as a deputy editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM). She is the recipient of two Dean’s Excellence in Research awards, the prestigious TTUHSC Chancellor’s Council Distinguished Research Award and the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) Distinguished Mentor award.

In addition to her institutional leadership roles, she has served on several national steering committees representing all four academic family medicine organizations and has served on key committees of NAPCRG and the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM). At the state level, she serves as chair of the Prevention Advisory Committee for CPRIT.