Megan Shen is a social psychologist and an Associate Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. She received her PhD from Baylor University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and faculty appointment at the Center for Research on End-of-Life Care at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. She is a leading expert on death, dying, and grief and with that hope, resilience, and coping. She has expertise in health communication and decision-making, looking at how our cultural and social environments influence how we interpret information and make decisions. Much of her research focuses on understanding and developing tools to support patients and families in making informed healthcare decisions at the end of life and coping with advanced illness. Central to her work is understanding how to find resilience, hope, and meaning in the face of challenging realities.

Dr. Shen has received multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her innovative work on supporting patients facing terminal illness, and she has consulted for Fortune 100 companies and industry leaders. Her work has appeared in multiple outlets such as the Huffington Post, USA Today, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and the Hill Reporter. She is a regular contributor to Harvard's Bill of Health blog and has her own column titled "How to Grow Hope" at Psychology today. She has appeared on NPR and CBS News Los Angeles (KCAL).

Her mission in life and in her work is to find the "Light in the wound," or the hope in the hard places of life which we all face. Subscribe to her newsletter around this topic of applying scientific frameworks to find good in the hard things in life: https://meganshen.substack.com/

Author/speaker/consultant website: https://www.meganjshen.com
Fred Hutch website: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/faculty-lab-directory/shen-megan.html