Dr. Nawar Shara is Chief of Research Data Science at MedStar Health Research Institute (MHRI), Founding Director of the MedStar-Georgetown Collaborative Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Research and Education (AI CoLab), and Director of the Center for Biostatistics, Informatics, and Data Science (CBIDS) at MedStar Health. In these roles, she provides strategic leadership for research data science, artificial intelligence, biostatistics, and informatics initiatives across MedStar Health and Georgetown University.
She is also Associate Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University. Over more than two decades, she has built an internationally recognized career spanning clinical and translational research, biostatistics, biomedical informatics, artificial intelligence, and implementation science.
She provides scientific leadership across MedStar and Georgetown through her roles as Director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD) Core and Co-Director of the Biomedical Informatics Core at the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (GHUCCTS), supporting investigators across a broad range of clinical and population health research and advancing multi-institutional collaboration through the Clinical and Translational Science Award program.
Dr. Shara leads a diverse portfolio of federally funded research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, and other public and private sponsors. She also serves as site lead for the NIH-funded AIM-AHEAD consortium’s Data & Research Core and Data Science Training Core, where her team supports research for more than 50 investigators.
Her work focuses on the responsible and effective use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, including predictive modeling, machine learning, digital health tools, and integration of AI into clinical workflows to improve patient outcomes, advance health equity, strengthen clinical decision-making, and accelerate the translation of research into practice.
A hallmark of Dr. Shara’s leadership is her ability to build sustainable research ecosystems and multidisciplinary collaborations that unite clinicians, scientists, engineers, data scientists, educators, and community partners across academic, healthcare, government, industry, and community settings. She is equally committed to developing the next generation of leaders through education and workforce development programs that train students, researchers, and healthcare professionals in the responsible application of AI and data science.
Dr. Shara is widely recognized as a trusted advisor on artificial intelligence in healthcare. She serves on national and international advisory boards and strategic committees across academia, healthcare systems, industry, and nonprofit organizations, and is a frequent invited and keynote speaker on AI, biomedical informatics, digital health, clinical research, and healthcare innovation. She also serves as a scientific reviewer for the NIH and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Fluent in English, Arabic, German, and French, she brings a global perspective to scientific collaboration and leadership.
Dr. Shara holds a PhD in Applied Statistics and a Master’s degree in Statistics from American University in Washington, DC, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Damascus University.