Professor, Division of Social Medicine
Dr. Kate Shannon (she/her) is a Professor of Social Medicine and Associate Faculty of Policy in the School of Population and Public Health. In 2020, she was named one of the inaugural CIHR Sex and Gender Science Chairs, and previously held a Canada Research Chair in Gender Equity, Sexual Health and Global Policy (2014-2024). Outside of medicine, she is an Affiliate Faculty and Advisor with the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program; Women’s Health Research Cluster; the Justice and Equity in Perinatal Services Research Hub; and Pan-Canadian STBBI Network (CTN+). She is current lead of the Sexual and Reproductive Health, Policy, & Social Justice Research Lab (RISE), and founding executive board member of the Canadian Organization for Sex & Gender Science.
At UBC, Dr. Shannon brings over 15years experience in CIHR, SSHRC, and NIH-funded community-engaged research and policy evaluation on equitable sexual health; reproductive care and justice; and intersectional feminist, decarceral, and human rights approaches to public health. She co-leads The Care We Deserve: Canadian Youth Mapping their Sexual Healthcare Needs, in partnership with a National Youth Advisory Board and Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights; and a community-engaged evaluation of youth-centred sexual health models in BC, with Options for Sexual Health. She is senior author of the Canadian Research Equity Toolkits in Sex & Gender in Methods and Measures, led by a national advisory of 2S/LGBTQ methods experts. In her earlier work, she spent over a decade evaluating the impact of criminalized laws, policies, and intersecting social inequities on health and human rights of sex workers, unhoused, and migrant youth, in close partnership with community, including expert evidence and legal interventions at Supreme Court of Canada, Lancet Sex Work and HIV Series, and editorials in JAMA, CMAJ, and BMJ.
She is strongly committed to research that affects change and her research has been widely cited in human rights recommendations and 500+ media reports and op-eds on evidence-based policy reform, including Amnesty International, the Global Fund, Open Society Foundation, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. Dr. Shannon regularly consults and/or provides expert evidence to local, national, and international policy bodies on sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR), from the House of Commons and BC Ministry of Health Sexual Health Advisory to international policy bodies, including WHO Dept of Reproductive Health, UNHCR, UNFPA, UNDP, UNAIDS, and Global Commission on HIV and the Law. She currently sits on the Women’s Legal Aid Action Fund (LEAF) case committee providing guidance on an intervention at the Supreme Court of Canada bringing an equality and intersectional feminist perspective to charter rights. She is mother to two amazing kids and spends as much time with her family in nature; whether swimming in the ocean, paddling, skiing, hiking, or trail running with her dog.