Dr. Shawna Hudson Appointed as Vice Chancellor for Dissemination and Implementation Science

June 26, 2023

Dear Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences community,

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Shawna Hudson, PhD, professor, vice chair of research and Henry Rutgers Chair of Family Medicine and Community Health, as vice chancellor for dissemination and implementation science at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) and senior associate dean for population health research at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS).

As vice chancellor, Dr. Hudson will lead and collaborate in the recruitment of newly tenured and tenure-track researchers into all schools at RBHS. She will facilitate building and leveraging resources across RBHS units to accelerate research, including leading our efforts in community-engaged research. Her appointment comes as a testament of her visionary leadership and commitment to innovation and collaboration, as demonstrated by her co-chair leadership for the RBHS strategic plan and many leadership roles at the medical school.

In her new role, Dr. Hudson will lead initiatives in population health science for RWJMS, in partnership with RBHS efforts led by Ethan Halm. She will bring together colleagues across all four of the school’s missions to enhance research that impacts health care delivery and improves outcomes for patients. This position aligns with Dr. Hudson’s new responsibilities as vice chancellor, working with investigators throughout RBHS and in tandem with efforts to enrich population health research at the university.

A medical sociologist, Dr. Hudson is a community-engaged, primary care researcher working with vulnerable populations at the intersections of community health, primary care and specialty care. Her research uses dissemination and implementation science methods to understand how community and health care contexts impact patient experience, clinician experience and patient outcomes in service of developing and deploying effective interventions to advance whole person care.

Dr. Hudson is the founding director of the school’s Center Advancing Research and Evaluation for Patient-Centered Care. She is a full research member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program and has a secondary faculty appointment in the Rutgers School of Public Health in the Department of Health Behavior, Society and Policy.

In addition, Dr. Hudson is a director for the Community Engagement Core of the New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science – a Clinical and Translational Science Award consortium of Rutgers University, Princeton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She led its $5 million National Institutes of Health-funded Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics for Underserved Populations initiative to improve outreach and access to COVID-19 testing within New Jersey’s vulnerable and underserved communities.

Dr. Hudson has published extensively on the role of primary care in long-term, follow-up care for cancer survivors. Her scholarship also advances a health equity agenda, working with vulnerable and underrepresented communities to create opportunities for community-engaged research. This expertise will further advance our medical school’s efforts to reduce health inequities by uniting strategies in patient care delivery with public health policy initiatives.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Hudson in these new roles.

Sincerely,

Amy P. Murtha, MD
Dean, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Brian L. Strom, MD, MPH
Chancellor, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences