Dr. Shawna V. Hudson is a medical sociologist who has committed her career to conducting community-engaged, health equity-focused research and cultivating trusted community partnerships.
A three time graduate of Rutgers University, Dr. Hudson received her B.A. from Rutgers College in 1992 where she was a James Dickson Carr Scholar and served on the board for New Student Orientation graduating with highest departmental honors in Sociology. She received a Trustees Fellowship to continue her graduate studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick where she received her M.A. (1995) and Ph.D (2001) in Sociology. Dr. Hudson completed post-doctoral training through a fellowship awarded from the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research.
Dr. Hudson is Professor, Research Division Chief and Henry Rutgers Chair of Family Medicine and Community Health at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She is also founding Director of the school’s Center Advancing Research and Evaluation for Patient-Centered Care (CARE-PC). Reflecting the experiences of patients, healthcare providers and the community is at the heart of her work.
An internationally recognized leader who has written extensively on the role of primary care in long-term follow-up care for cancer survivors, Dr. Hudson recently co-authored a National Academies of Science and Engineering report on Implementing High Quality Primary Care. She gets her inspiration and passion for this work through her local service as a Commissioner on the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research and as a volunteer with several local community groups including Sister2Sister, Inc., a 501c3 organization Supporting Minority and Underserved Breast Cancer Survivors.
Dr. Hudson leads and serves as a collaborator on multiple, multi-million-dollar National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute funded studies. She has co-authored over 80 research papers. She serves as Director for the Community Engagement Core of the NJ Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science (NJ ACTS), a consortium between Rutgers University, Princeton University and New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2020, she was selected to lead a $5 million, NIH-funded initiative to improve outreach and access to COVID-19 testing within New Jersey vulnerable and underserved communities.
Dr. Hudson has mentored 70+ students, fellows and junior faculty over her 19 year career. One of her main joys is watching her mentees thrive and pay forward the many blessings of success to our next generation of BIPOC scholars.
Married to Dr. Ralph Pantozzi, also a proud three-time Rutgers alum of the Graduate School of Education, a Math Educator and recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, Dr. Hudson lives in Millington. They are the joyful parents of daughters Kara, a rising high school sophomore, and Mira, a Class of 2024 Rutgers School of Communication and Information student.