Stanley Shaw, AB '87, MD PhD '95

I grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, and did my undergraduate, MD, and PhD all at Harvard, with my major in Chemistry and Physics and my PhD in biophysics. My wife Alice and I have two kids and an energetic pandemic puppy. I am a general cardiologist, supervising an inpatient cardiology service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for 2-4 weeks a year. My research efforts are part of a cardiology moonshot project to identify the earliest signs of coronary disease, and we also have an ongoing project to analyze the stool microbiome. 

Working with HMS Executive Education learners

But most of my time now is spent in my role as an Associate Dean for Executive Education at Harvard Medical School (HMS). I lead the medical school’s educational programs for companies and individuals in the healthcare industry to help them develop leadership skills, but also take deep dives into science, technology, digital tools, and the inner workings of real-world health care. This all started when I was asked to develop a custom HMS program for Google, and the success of that program led to the opportunity to do this officially.

I’ve learned so much from speaking with people who are on the front lines of developing new drugs or software to improve patient lives, and hearing about their leadership, business or strategic challenges. It’s uncanny how often I come across Harvard alumni in very senior industry leadership positions, whether they’re from the medical school, business school, college or another School.

We had the inaugural reunion of HMS Alumni in Industry in 2019, and welcomed our MD alumni back to campus spanning over 50 graduation years and all sorts of industry sectors - biopharma, tech, medical devices, investing, and others. There was an amazing energy when that group of alumni got together for the first time.

Group photo from HMS Alumni in Industry gathering

For the most part, our educational programs help companies address strategic questions like how to accelerate clinical development, better understand the patient experience, or leverage digital tools. With COVID, we also went from all of our programs being in-person to all of them being online, and we were pleasantly surprised about how well that went. We got more businesses participating, and we reached learners from all over the world. We are now able to offer a fuller portfolio, with everything from in-person, live online, asynchronous online, and blended programs. The pandemic was really an impetus for transformation.

When I was in college, I had a narrow view of what my career options would be. I was pretty sure I wanted to go to graduate school to get a PhD, but I was uncertain enough that I applied to both PhD and MD PhD programs at the same time.

When I spoke to people at HMS, they told these amazing stories about the patients they interacted with - some of them very moving and dramatic - and I knew I would regret it if I didn’t try medicine.

My PhD advisor was James Wang (he’s now retired). He was an expert in DNA topology and understanding the implications of the DNA strands in a double helix being physically wound around each other, and he was part of the generation of early molecular biologists who came from chemistry or physics. Jim was trained as a physical chemist.

Even though my PhD work was not particularly clinically relevant, it influenced how I think about things and has helped me approach biological questions in an interdisciplinary way. You learn a way of thinking in your PhD that is very valuable and will stick with you, no matter what you do.

On a lighter note, in grad school I actually kept this crazy night time schedule where I would work all night, then go out for breakfast in Davis Square at like five in the morning with some other students, and then sleep. So when I went back to medical school, I had no fear of staying up all night on call because I had already been doing that as a graduate student. That’s not a commonly discussed benefit of doing a PhD!

Before I took on this role in Executive Education, I spent my time in pretty conventional ways as a physician-scientist in academics. I’m very glad that I said ‘yes’ to the chance to work on that Google educational program, and it ended up taking my career in a direction I would never have predicted. It’s been a great opportunity to be entrepreneurial and build a new organization, while drawing from all the different parts of my training, research and clinical experiences.

Family photo, Cape Cod

I’m often asked by college students if an MD PhD is necessary for a research career in medicine - I think it’s certainly very helpful, but it’s a very individual decision. You have to want to spend the years as a graduate student at that particular time of your life. If you do, it’s a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in a field, and become a bit of an expert. Ultimately, it takes more research time even beyond graduate school to develop your independence and find your niche. So you have to put in the time, somehow. But there are ways to devote time to research without officially doing a PhD, and there are many smart researchers who I admire very much who have an MD but no PhD. 

The other thing I would say is that there are more ways to “use” your medical training than ever before, which is great for our medical students and great for society. If you just read the newspapers, you will see Harvard physicians (and other Harvard alumni) as leaders in academia, health care delivery, community organization and social justice, public health, biopharma and medical devices, investing, Silicon Valley tech companies, government and policy, and others.

With so many options, I think it’s important to make an effort to hear from people beyond those who are most accessible to us - who are often people just a few years ahead of us in training, or who we otherwise encounter in the course of our academic training. That’s one reason why I’m happy to be working with Harvard Alumni in Health Care, which gathers all sorts of people with interesting and varied health care careers.

Stanley Shaw

AB 1987 | Chemistry and Physics

MD 1995 

PhD 1995 

Associate Dean for Executive Education at Harvard Medical School

Compiled and interviewed by Felicia Ho