Shari Barkin, MD, MSHS, Pediatrician-in-Chief and Department of Pediatrics Chair

Shari Barkin, MD, MSHS, serves as Pediatrician-in-Chief for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Pediatric Institute. In her multiple roles, Dr. Barkin drives clinical excellence and innovation for medical specialty programs and guides Children’s academic missions of research and teaching. She directs division chiefs at Children’s who oversee more than 22 medical specialties and guides more than 45 pediatric physician training programs.

Dr. Barkin is a board-certified pediatrician specializing in academic general pediatrics and health services research. In 2021, she was elected into the National Academy of Medicine. She is an international expert in the field of behavioral interventions and community-engaged pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT) research. She completed the longest pediatric obesity prevention pragmatic randomized controlled trial for underserved preschool age children. In 2008, she founded the Nashville Collaborative, an academic-community partnership to develop and test two generation obesity prevention and treatment strategies. More than twenty studies have been launched through this partnership since its inception.

Over the past 20 years, her studies have demonstrated that behavior change appears to be non-linear and works differently for different sub-groups. She examines the interaction of genetics, behavior, and environment at sensitive periods of childhood development. She developed one of the only community behavioral interventions for Latinx preschool-age overweight/obese children that effectively reduced BMI, a program now implemented in recreation centers nationally. Her success was due to the novel integration of the science of social networks as an integral part of her behavior change interventions. Her findings challenge conventional wisdom regarding obesity prevention in underserved populations, paving the way for new directions to address this complex issue that disproportionately affects under-represented minority populations.

Dr. Barkin has authored more than 130 manuscripts and has been consistently grant funded for more than 25 years. Over the course of her career, she has mentored more than 100 mentees and has been recognized with a number of honors and awards—including serving on the Institute of Medicine’s Board of Children Youth and Families (2010-2017) and being selected as Pediatrician of the Year in Tennessee (2018) and the National Research Award from the Academic Pediatric Association (2019). She was nominated by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Advisory Child Health and Human Development Council from 2020-2024. She serves as President of the Board of Trustees for the International Pediatric Research Foundation (2024-2026) and is Past-President of the Society of Pediatric Research (2016-2017).

Prior to joining Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Dr. Barkin served as the Division Chief of Academic General Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and then served as Physician in Chief of the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at VCU School of Medicine. She enjoys music, dance and yoga, and spending time with her family.