Dr. Shannon is Director of the Gender & Sexual Health Initiative at the BC-CfE and an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Associate Faculty in the School of Population and Public Health at University of British Columbia. She leads a large program of NIH and CIHR-funded research on social determinants of sexual health, HIV/AIDS and access to care among marginalized populations, particularly youth, sex workers, and women at-risk and living with HIV.

She is currently PI of longitudinal cohorts of street and off-street sex workers (AESHA), an ethnographic-qualitative program of the HIV risk environment of SW, and the Gender, Violence and HIV Team. She sits on the CIHR HIV/AIDS Advisory Board and is Associate Editor with the International Journal of Drug Policy and BMC International Health and Human Rights. She has consulted with the departments of reproductive health and HIV with the World Health Organization, and was a member of the WHO 2012 Guidelines Group for HIV Prevention, Treatment and Care among Sex Workers in LMIC.

She sits on the steering committee of the Canada Africa HIV Prevention Trials Network (CAPT-N) funded by the Global Health Research Initiative, and is PI of the Gulu Sexual Health Project among youth, sex workers, and women living with HIV in post-conflict northern Uganda. She is a Micheal Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar/ Career Investigator and recipient of the CIHR Peter Lougheed Award as the top-ranked New Investigator in Canada in 2010.