There’s a Method to his Success

By Meredith Lidard Kleeman, as published in Capsule Magazine, Summer 2025

When Chintal Shah, PhD ’23, MS, BPharm, a health economist and pharmacoepidemiologist based in Rockville, Md., was undecided about pursuing a research career in academia or in the pharmaceutical industry, he conscientiously and judiciously considered the evidence. What one might call an evidence-based approach.

“We talk a lot about evidence-based medicine, or evidence based decision-making, so I thought, why don’t I apply that to my life and my decisions as well?” Shah recalls. He already knew a bit about academic research from his time as a student in the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy’s PhD in Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR) program but was less familiar with industry research. “The only way I’ll know if that’s something I want to get into is if I do an internship,” Shah says.

At the end of the fourth year of his PhD studies, he landed an internship with Takeda Pharmaceuticals working on rare disease projects and went on to become a rare disease fellow with the company’s value and evidence generation team. Those experiences persuaded him to focus his career on industry. AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals hired Shah as a senior scientist in oncology outcomes research after his 2023 School of Pharmacy graduation.

“Some individuals are disease-specific, but for me, I was more interested in the methods and the application of the methods to various disease areas,” Shah says. That curiosity about methods has led to research related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), hematology and rare diseases, and oncology.

Shah applied his interest in analytical methods in his PhD dissertation to quantify the economic burden of COPD in the United States. By contrasting data with previous research, Shah demonstrated that although the proportion of costs for pharmacotherapy has increased in the last 20 years, there has been a decreased burden of inpatient hospitalizations. That’s in part due to the availability of medications that can manage the disease. That research was featured on the American Lung Association’s website.

When Shah was pursuing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Mumbai’s Principal K. M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy, he had never heard about the field of health economic and outcomes research (HEOR). At the time, it wasn’t even part of the college’s curriculum. Shah’s sister, who was pursuing her PhD in medicinal chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, learned about it through a friend in the field, and thought it might be a good fit for her inquisitive brother.

Intrigued, Shah began researching the emerging field and decided to pursue a career working in HEOR. “I was, and still am,
convinced that HEOR is the future of health care research,” he wrote in his application to the School of Pharmacy’s PhD in PHSR program. “A country’s prosperity depends not only on the financial well-being of its citizens, but also their physical well-being. To ensure this, it is imperative that we do research on real-world data.”

After completing his master’s degree in pharmaceutical outcomes and policy at the University of Florida, Shah was accepted
to the School of Pharmacy.

“During his PhD, Chintal actively contributed to numerous research projects and published several manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals,” says Zafar Zafari, PhD, MSc, associate professor in the Department of Practice, Sciences, and Health Outcomes Research. “Beyond his research achievements, Chintal excelled as a teaching assistant and later expanded his academic contributions by serving as a guest lecturer for the health economics course.”

Shah credits the School with nurturing and encouraging his innate curiosity. He often returns to campus to deliver guest lectures, and recently attended the School’s PATIENTS Professors Academy, which teaches the 10-Step Framework of patient-centered and community-engaged health research. “I still continue to be in touch with my professors, and to be affiliated with the School of Pharmacy because I had such a good experience,” Shah says.