How a Gator made ripples worldwide

September 2, 2026 — As a 9-year-old, Shubhada Hooli, M.D., M.P.H., recalls witnessing the impact of health disparities while visiting family in India. She saw two girls, even younger than she was at the time, begging on a street corner.

“It was one of those formative experiences where I thought, ‘This is just not right,’” Hooli said. “I wanted to do something that would level that field, make it so that one’s life wouldn’t be dictated just by the circumstances they were born into. I really felt a desire to connect with children.”

Now, she works as a pediatric emergency medicine physician-scientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Hooli’s passion for people continuously drove her to travel the globe and focus on improving health equity.

Identifying a passion for medicine didn’t come until her undergraduate studies at the University of Florida. At 17, the St. Petersburg, Florida, native originally began as a food resource economics major.  She quickly immersed herself in organizations like Dance Marathon, a charity fundraising event where participants stay on their feet and dance or play games for anywhere from 24 to 48 hours. Such experiences taught her about pediatric care from Children’s Miracle Network and the services UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital offered. In her sophomore year, she consequently decided to switch her major to microbiology after becoming inspired to go to medical school. With guidance from physicians like John Sleasman, M.D., and the late Richard Bucciarelli, M.D., she graduated as a double Gator with her bachelor’s degree in 2001 and medical degree from the College of Medicine in 2006.

“Dr. Bucciarelli met with me and asked, ‘What are you interested in?’” she said. “I had always been interested in HIV, and he just made it happen. He introduced me to Dr. Sleasman, and Dr. Sleasman then took me under his wing. He didn’t have to do any of that. He just made it so easy and he cared. He was always a role model.”

During her studies, she took advantage of UF’s short-term travel opportunities to understand different health systems — pediatric clinics in Nicaragua, a medical education collaborative in Mexico, humanitarian crisis aid in Haiti.

“UF was such a formative experience,” she said. “There are moments in your life where you can look back and say, ‘Wow, that really made a difference,’ and I would definitely say there were a lot of things that happened at UF that made a difference.”

As a 27-year-old resident, Hooli flew to Botswana alone for a month — an experience that required a level of confidence she had built from prior global health exposures.

After completing a pediatric residency in the community health and advocacy track at George Washington University in 2009, she received a master’s degree in global health from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2011.

After completing her public health degree, Hooli’s international work picked up speed. With the Texas Children’s Global Health Corps at Baylor College of Medicine, she moved to Lilongwe, Malawi, to care for children and mothers living with HIV at one of the country’s largest public hospitals. Before she knew it, she was advising the Ministry of Health on pediatric and neonatal care.

In 2013, she said she was recruited back to Harvard and moved from Malawi to Kigali, Rwanda, to help launch a new pediatric residency program.

“While I was working in Rwanda, I was teaching trainees and nurses how to recognize children in respiratory failure,” she said. “I realized some of the signs we talk about in the U.S. were limited in scope, and the disease processes are different in Rwanda than what we see in the U.S.”

To Hooli, her work was no longer about where she could go, but what she could change.

“Those three years living in sub-Saharan Africa were incredibly important and informative for me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Now I’m going to transition to start doing research.’”

In 2015, Hooli returned to the U.S. with a determined spirit. With the help of mentors and peers, she conceptualized a paper using data collected in Malawi, and later Bangladesh, to determine warning signs for respiratory illness in children in emergency care, as she said not enough had been published on the matter.

We found that there were five signs that were most important for clinicians to evaluate and health policy makers to understand as they strengthened developing health systems.”

The problem, she noted, is many clinics in these countries don’t have pulse oximeters to measure if a child’s oxygen is dangerously low. Her team’s study clarified which children with pneumonia are at highest risk of mortality and what clinicians could do without a pulse oximeter.

The study found that having a very high respiratory rate was one of the clinical indicators associated with hypoxemia, or low blood oxygen level. But that wasn’t in the pneumonia guidelines from the World Health Organization, or WHO, that had last been updated in 2014, Hooli said. Once researchers from multiple countries shared their pneumonia data, WHO analysts replicated the study and confirmed several of her findings.

Her paper, titled “Clinical hypoxemia score for outpatient child pneumonia care lacking pulse oximetry in Africa and South Asia,” was cited in WHO’s updated pneumonia guidelines released at the end of 2024.

What started off as a Gator making ripples transformed into a scene of changing tides.

“My primary objective with this research is more as a tool of advocacy, and I’ve been unusually successful in making sure policymakers know of my work,” she said.

She now leads an NIH-funded research group and studies pulse oximeter accuracy in children with diverse skin tones in the United States and South Africa.

When Hooli reflected on her journey, she fondly remembered her global health opportunities and two mentors from UF: the late Gerold L. Schiebler, M.D., and Bucciarelli.

“They really emphasized the importance of being a physician who thinks about the continuum,” she said. “Think about the individual patient, about how we solve disease processes, what the underpinnings of the disease are and how we can have an impact on health policy and the way things run to support and improve child health outcomes.

“That component of my career and the way I approach things is unique, and it 100% comes from those mentors at UF.”