Colette Shen

About Colette Shen

COLETTE SHEN is currently an assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill where her interests revolve around improving treatments and long-term outcomes for patient populations she cares for. She takes care of patients with central nervous system (CNS), pediatric, and head and neck malignancies and has continued focus on treatment of brain metastases with stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). She is also focused on novel radiopharmaceutical techniques to guide and enhance cancer treatments.

Colette is very interested in evaluating long-term toxicities following radiotherapy, in particular to the brain. In conjunction with collaborators from radiology, physics, neurology, and neuropsychology, she hopes to evaluate and correlate imaging-based and neurocognitive changes following focal radiotherapy to the brain, in both adult and pediatric patients.

Colette was born to parents from Taiwan who now live in Houston, TX. She completed an MD/PhD in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University in 2004 with a BA in engineering sciences. She completed her residency in Radiation Oncology at Johns Hopkins. 

Colette has conducted lab research on tissue engineering and stem cells at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research has led to several journal publications and was honored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame. She served as an undergraduate representative on the Harvard University Curricular Review, was director of the Harvard University-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hippocratic Society promoting issues in healthcare, and was vice-president of Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe.