Neeral Shah wins Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award

An academic transplant hepatologist, Shah has treated patients with liver disease and pioneered innovative diagnostic techniques for bleeding disorders

By Arun Kumar

Neeral Shah, an Indian American professor of medicine at the University of Virginia, is one of the 12 recipients of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Awards, the state’s highest honor for faculty at Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities.

Since 1987, these awards have recognized faculty at Virginia’s institutions of higher learning who exemplify the highest standards of teaching, scholarship and service, according to a press release from the State Council of Higher Education and Dominion Energy.

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Shah is an academic transplant hepatologist who has provided care to patients with liver disease, performed thousands of colonoscopies and collaborated with biomedical engineers to pioneer innovative diagnostic techniques for bleeding disorders.

Shah is the director of the Gastroenterology Fellowship Program and co-chair of the pre-clerkship curriculum. He is editor of Access Medicine and The Infographic Guide to Medicine, which is used in 70 countries and 98% of medical schools in the US.

His dedication to medical education is equally impressive, having taught at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 15 years and shaped the careers of over 2,400 students.

Shah was honored as the Early Career Physician by the American College of Physicians (ACP) in Virginia and received national recognition with the prestigious Herbert Waxman Award as the top educator in the country, presented by the ACP at their international conference.

His leadership in the field is further highlighted by his active participation on committees for each of the major gastrointestinal societies in the United States, and his recent election as Governor of Virginia for the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), representing both academic and private practice gastroenterologists in Virginia.

At the University of Virginia, Shah has garnered every major teaching award, including the Mulholland Student Society’s student-voted teaching award, the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award, the School of Medicine Harrison Distinguished Educators Award, and the All University Teaching Award at UVA in 2016.

Within the medical school, Shah was instrumental in the development of a new problem-based learning and team-based learning curriculum. Even when the pandemic abruptly struck, Shah demonstrated exceptional adaptability by transforming his course overnight to be delivered via Zoom and videoconferencing, ensuring that students maintained the vital personal connections so crucial for bedside medicine.

In the clinical setting, Dr. Shah has significantly impacted graduate medical education as well. As an Associate Program Director, he guided over 100 internal medicine residents each year. Subsequently for the past eight years, he has served as the Gastroenterology Fellowship Program Director, overseeing the training of fellows preparing for careers in GI.

Beyond the university, Shah’s influence extends to the broader medical community. He has played a key role in organizing continuing medical education conferences at both local and regional levels. Notably, he served as the Director of a regional GI conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, for several years and has been the driving force behind the Annual GI Conference at UVA.

Shah has BS degrees in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering and holds an MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.