Raj C. Shah, MD, is a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Rush Medical College. He also has a conjoint appointment as Professor in the Graduate College of Rush University. He serves as the Assistant Vice Provost, Clinical Research, Rush University.
Shah completed his bachelor of science in chemical engineering at Northwestern University and attended the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. After completing a family practice residency at West Suburban Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois, he received further training in geriatrics at Rush University. He is board-certified in family medicine with a certificate of added qualification in geriatrics.
Shah’s academic career interest is the design and conduct of clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of age-related conditions in diverse communities including, but not limited to, memory loss and disability-free survival.
He is a principal investigator for clinical trials and other research studies in aging. He also provides or has provided support for longitudinal research and infrastructure projects on memory and aging, including the Rush Memory and Aging Project, the Rush Religious Orders Study, the Rush Minority Aging and Research Study, the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Core Center, the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Assistance Center, the Rush Center of Excellence on Disparities in HIV and Aging, and the Rush Memory Clinic Data and Specimen Repository.
Shah is also the Rush site principal investigator for the Chicago Area Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network, a consortium of academic health systems and other partners working to develop, test and implement strategies to improve care for diverse residents in the Chicago region in order to improve health care quality, health outcomes and health equity. He is the Rush site principal investigator for the All of Us Research Program of the NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative. He is the Associate Director of the Network Capacity Cluster for the Institute for Translational Medicine, a Clinical Translational Science Award program led by The University of Chicago and Rush.
His research manuscripts focus on non-neurological, modifiable factors associated with disability-free survival and novel clinical trial design and implementation.
Shah currently is the co-Director of the Center for Community Health Equity, an initiative jointly led by Rush University and DePaul University designed to reduce hardship and improve health outcomes in Chicago. He also mentors students interested in the health sciences at the high school, college, graduate and post-graduate levels.
