Shira Kupperman Boehler

Shira Kupperman Boehler is a finance professional, health advocate, author and lung cancer survivor on a mission to change how America detects and thinks about the disease. She holds a degree in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business. Alongside her husband Adam, she has spent her career building and scaling multibillion-dollar healthcare businesses, developing deep relationships across health systems, payers and policymakers.

A lifelong athlete and daily runner who had never smoked, Shira was healthy, active and completely without symptoms when a preventive full-body MRI revealed a mass in her right lung. A follow-up low-dose chest CT scan followed by a bronchoscopy confirmed the unexpected: Shira had adenocarcinoma, a fast-growing Stage 1B lung cancer. She underwent surgery to remove the mass and, within weeks, was running again.

The experience transformed her. What started as a personal health crisis quickly evolved into a mission. Shira authored One Scan Saved My Life, a memoir and call to action published by Skyhorse Publishing, and founded the nonprofit Cancer Doesn't Care, working to change screening guidelines, expand access to low-dose CT scans and influence public policy. She advocates for broader screening, even suggesting that lung scans be paired with routine mammograms, noting that today up to two-thirds of lung cancer patients would not qualify for screening under current federal guidelines. All proceeds from her book support that work.

Her message is urgent: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, and 1 in 4 patients has never smoked. "If you have lungs, you can get lung cancer," she says. Shira lives with her husband and four kids in Nashville, Tennessee, where she juggles all of it from her minivan, coffee in one hand and a carpool schedule in the other.