Meet Megan
About Megan
Dr. Megan Shen is a social psychologist, research professor, author, and keynote speaker. Her writing, research, and speaking focus on how we can find hope and resilience amidst sorrow, pain, and challenges.
Dr. Shen earned her Ph.D. from Baylor University in 2012. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2015. Following that, she was an Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City (2015-2021). Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, where she focuses on her research program on the topics of how to cope with and plan for advanced illness and ultimately, end of life. She also devotes her time to writing and speaking on topics of resilience, hope, grief, and burnout.
Her Geekwire talk, How to Fight against Burnout and Build Hopeful and Resilient Organizations by Embracing Challenges, Grief, and Loss bridges her work and experience with dying patients and their families to apply lessons learned on building resilience and hope amidst challenges and loss more broadly. Her work with organizations and business settings is featured through her writings at Entrepreneur.com.
For over a decade, Dr. Shen has examined the communication, decision-making, and social support around patients’ living with advanced illness to develop tools to help them thrive amidst challenging diagnoses. She has focused specifically on applying a health equity lens to this work, with the intended goal of developing tools tailored to meet various patient populations’ needs. Her work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2015, through multiple research grants as Principal Investigator, including a K07 career award, R01s, R44s, and R21s. She has received multiple awards and honors for her outstanding scientific contributions, including a MERIT award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and recognition by the Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine as an Outstanding Research Scholar.
“Helping individuals and organizations find their most resilient and hopeful selves by finding breakthrough in the middle of change, loss, pain, and challenges.”
Her work has been published in top academic journals including Cancer, JAMA Network Open, Supportive Care in Cancer, and Psycho-Oncology. Her writing has also been published in USA Today, Entrepreneur, HuffPost, the Hill Reporter, Invisible Magazine, and the Thinking Republic. She is a regular contributor to Harvard’s Bill of Health blog and is a columnist at Psychology Today with her featured column, “How to Grow Hope.”
Dr. Shen loves to apply scientific frameworks, integrated with philosophy and art, to think about how we can build more resilient and hopeful versions of ourselves despite of, and because of, the many challenges life brings our way.