Sheila Shanmugan, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Sheila Shanmugan is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Obstetrics/Gynecology, and Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. She is also a Reproductive Psychiatrist and is the Director of research at the Penn Center for Women's Behavioral Wellness. She completed her medical, graduate, and postdoctoral training at Penn. During her PhD, she worked with Dr. Neill Epperson, and during her postdoc, she worked with Dr. Ted Satterthwaite. Dr. Shanmugan's work leverages multi-modal neuroimaging, clinical data science, and hormone administration paradigms to understand mechanisms underlying sex differences in psychopathology and identify neuroendocrinologic markers of risk vs. resilience for psychiatric disorders. The goal of her work is to use this information to personalize early interventions in reproductive psychiatry. She has received multiple prestigious awards for her research including the NIH Director's DP5 Early Independence Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, and a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award.

Dr. Shanmugan is also a Reproductive Psychiatrist and her clinical expertise includes perinatal and postpartum psychiatric disorders, perimenopausal mood disorders and cognitive dysfunction, menopausal hormone therapy, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. She precepts the Women's Mental Health Clinic at Penn, during which she supervises senior resident physicians who treat patients with hormone-related psychiatric symptoms. She is also a dedicated teacher, and in 2021, she founded Penn's Women's Mental Health Certificate Program, a curriculum consisting of clinical experiences, expert mentorship, focused didactics, and research pursuits by which psychiatry residents can obtain specialized training in reproductive psychiatry. She continues to direct and serve as a mentor for this program.