Dr. Shah attended medical school at Topiwala National Medical College (B.Y.L. Nair Hospital, Mumbai, India) and completed her residency at N.H.L. Medical College Ahmedabad in India and Brookdale University Hospital in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr. Shah graduated from the Pediatric Endocrinology Fellowship program at the Univeristy of Oklahoma College of Medicine in 2018.
Dr. Shah became an Assistant Professor in the section of Pediatric Diabetes and Endocrinology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in 2018. She is currently a clinician scientist who sees patients and performs translational research.
Clinical/Research Interests:
The overarching focus of Dr. Shah's research is to understand the role of the early life environment specifically exposure to maternal diabetes and obesity on the metabolic health of the infant. The role of microRNAs (miRNAs) as regulators of metabolic adaption has become a personal area of her interest since her training. During her training, she received numerous honors, awards and grants from the children’s hospital foundation and endocrine fellow foundation. As part of her fellowship, she investigated impact of gestational diabetes on microRNAs in the offspring circulation. As a natural outgrowth of her fellowship training projects, she is currently involved in investigating role of maternal factors such as diabetes and obesity on human milk exosomal microRNAs. She has received clinician scientist development grant from the Presbyterian health foundation. Breast milk is one of richest sources of miRNAs that are encapsulated within exosomes protecting them from enzymatic degradation. Breast milk exosomes survive digestion and deliver miRNAs to infant intestinal epithelial cells or can be absorbed in systemic circulation to have biologic effect on metabolically relevant tissues. Thus, milk exosomes and their miRNAs may affect post transcriptional target gene transcription regulating infant metabolic pathways. Her group has shown that maternal obesity and exposure to diabetes during pregnancy alters expression of breast milk miRNAs involved in metabolic pathways. Further, they have also shown that miR-148a and miR-30b (miRNA involved in glucose homeostasis and energy metabolism) are significant predictors of fat acquisition in early infancy. This work is recently published in my manuscript titled “Human Milk Exosomal microRNA: Associations with Maternal Overweight/Obesity and Infant Body Composition at 1 Month of Life” in Nutrients. To begin to understand the biological significance of ingested miRNAs, she will be performing mechanistic studies in in vitro culture models.