Karen Sheehan, MD, MPH

Chicago, Illinois
Professor of Pediatrics, Medical Education, and Preventive Medicine
Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine
Medical Director of the Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities
Associate Chair of Advocacy for the Department of Pediatrics
Medical Director of Lurie Children’s Injury Prevention & Research Center

We are excited to present this year's Pioneer Award to Karen Sheehan, MD, MPH, Professor of Pediatrics, Medical Education, and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She is a dedicated injury prevention researcher and a passionate advocate for children’s health and well-being. Dr. Sheehan is a founding volunteer of the Chicago Youth Programs, a community-based organization that works to improve the health and life opportunities of at-risk youth.

The Chicago Youth Programs (CYP) strives to improve the health and life opportunities of vulnerable youth by providing programs that address the children's recreational, educational, and health care needs. Dr. Sheehan realized early in training that a “once-a-year well-child care visit” was not enough to improve a child's health. Getting children out of poverty has the greatest effect on their health and thus the CYP programming focuses on helping children graduate from college or trade school. For nearly 25 years, she has directed CYP's clinic, which is staffed by volunteer medical students.

Dr. Sheehan is also the Department of Pediatrics' Associate Chair of Advocacy and frequently partners with agencies such as the Chicago Park District, Chicago Department of Public Health, and Chicago Public Schools to improve child health. For example, using a multi-sector, collaborative approach, she has led city-wide injury prevention efforts in window fall prevention and playground safety. Her paper documenting neighborhood disparities in playground safety motivated the city of Chicago to commit to replacing 350 playgrounds over 5 years. She helped create the Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY), which is convened by Lurie Children's and connects over 3000 community partners to prevent violence by using a public health approach.

Dr. Sheehan directs the pediatric residency advocacy/population health track (called Health and Society) at the Feinberg School of Medicine. She serves as a coach for the Department of Pediatrics, Office of Faculty Development. She is the Medical Director of Lurie Children’s Injury Prevention & Research Center and the Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities. She has published studies on safe sleep, firearm injury prevention, social determinants of health, violence injury prevention, opioid use and child maltreatment topics just to name a few.

Dr. Sheehan’s research and practice have consistently focused on community engagement, ranging from using community-based participatory research to evaluate youth development programs to applying policy-system-environmental change strategies. Dr. Sheehan has held leadership positions in the Injury Free Coalition for Kids, Kids in Danger, and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ former Section on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention. Karen has been a member and leader in Injury Free Coalition for Kids since 1993. She has presented abstracts, moderated sessions, judged presentations, mentored many young injury prevention advocates and won the PI of the year award in 2022. Those who know and love her also know she is an avid swimmer and a lover of drum karaoke night!

We are so fortunate to have Dr. Karen Sheehan as an IFCK Pioneer and are looking forward to hearing her talk on “Looking Back, Forging Forward!”