Melissa Shoemaker, M.D.

Melissa Shoemaker, M.D., M.P.H., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of its Division of Endocrinology. Her clinical interests include obesity medicine, lifestyle medicine, and preventive medicine.

Dr. Shoemaker holds a bachelor's degree in information systems from Texas Tech University in Lubbock. She earned her medical degree at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and completed a residency in general preventive medicine at the University of California San Diego Medical Center. She then received advanced training through a fellowship in obesity medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also holds a master's degree in public health from San Diego State University.

She joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2023.

Dr. Shoemaker’s research interests centers on innovative approaches to public health, with a particular focus on chronic disease surveillance, health equity, and integrative lifestyle interventions. Her work with the San Diego County Health and Human Services Department involved planning the implementation of the CDC’s MENDS application, a data visualization tool designed to model priority health equity issues. She has contributed to the development of pilot programs such as Food Is Medicine, which provided nutrition screening and grant-funded health coaching to underserved, medically complex populations, and Supervised Lifestyle Integrative Medicine (SLIM), a virtual shared medical appointment model aimed at weight loss through lifestyle medicine. Additionally, Dr. Shoemaker has demonstrated a commitment to youth engagement and technology access through her creation of the Makerspace Cart at the University of New Mexico Children’s Hospital, a mobile unit designed to bring creative technologies to hospitalized adolescents.