Victoria Shanmugam, MBBS, MRCP, FACR, CCD

Director, NIH Office of Autoimmune Disease Research in the Office of Research on Women’s Health

Victoria Shanmugam, MBBS, MRCP, FACR, CCD, currently serves as the director of the Office of Autoimmune Disease Research in the Office of Research on Women’s Health (OADR-ORWH). 

Dr. Shanmugam is an experienced physician-scientist, rheumatologist, and academic leader. She graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. in physiology and completed her medical degree at Imperial College School of Medicine in London, graduating with honors in medicine. She is a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London. Dr. Shanmugam completed the Internal Medicine Residency and Rheumatology Fellowship at Georgetown University and joined the faculty of Georgetown University School of Medicine in 2007.

Dr. Shanmugam received master’s-level clinical and translational research training through the K30 program and was a KL2 scholar at the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science. Her research focused on scleroderma and wound healing, as well as the interplay of the host immune system with the microbiome in patients with chronic wounds. While on faculty at Georgetown, she served as the chair of the Institutional Review Board and as director of the Orthopedics, Rheumatology, and Dermatology module for Georgetown University School of Medicine.

A talented academic leader, Dr. Shanmugam subsequently served as chief of rheumatology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences from 2014 to 2021. She was the inaugural chair of the Clara Bliss Hinds Society for Women in Medicine and Health Sciences and served as chair of the Research Committee for the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Shanmugam is widely respected in the field of autoimmune diseases, having served in multiple leadership roles for the American College of Rheumatology.

Follow Dr. Shanmugam online at https://orwh.od.nih.gov/OADR-ORWH and @vickishanmugam.