John A. Shepherd, PhD
Contact PD/PI · Administrative Core Co-Director
Chief Scientific Officer, University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center · B.H. and Alice C. Beams Endowed Professor in Cancer Research, JABSOM
Part of the Administrative Core →
Dr. Shepherd is the Chief Scientific Officer of the University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center and the B.H. and Alice C. Beams Endowed Professor in Cancer Research at the John A. Burns School of Medicine. He is also a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), and a former President of the International Society for Clinical Densitometry.
He received his PhD in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at Princeton University. From there he developed body composition and bone density algorithms for a major women’s health company, where his patents are the basis for the accuracy of that company’s body composition algorithms. He then joined the Radiology Department of the University of California San Francisco and led his research group for 19 years, studying a wide variety of imaging biomarkers for breast cancer, obesity, and osteoporosis using advanced machine-learning techniques.
For the past eight years he has been with the University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center, where he directs the Hawaiʻi Pacific Islands Mammography Registry, currently monitoring over 125,000 women to develop breast cancer risk models for a population with high disparity and underrepresentation. He co-hosts the biennial International Breast Density and Risk Assessment Workshops. He has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2005, has led six R01-funded studies, and has published over 400 peer-reviewed papers cited more than 30,000 times. As Contact PD/PI, he leads PAC-AID alongside MPI Youping Deng.
Profile information adapted from Chief Scientific Officer, University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center · B.H. and Alice C. Beams Endowed Professor in Cancer Research, JABSOM.