Notre Dame, 1979
• 1980 Second Team Academic All-America®
• 1981 Second Team Academic All-America®
Dr. Carol Lally Shields was an Honorary Inductee to the CoSIDA Academic All-America® Hall of Fame in 2011.
When Carol Lally Shields started at Notre Dame in fall 1975, the women’s basketball team had not yet earned varsity status. She was a starter for the school’s club team her first two years, then led the newly-christened varsity team in scoring during her junior and senior years. In her final season at Notre Dame, she was varsity team captain, MVP, and the first female recipient of the Byron Kanaley Award, the school’s highest honor for student-athletes. She garnered these athletic accolades while making the dean’s list every semester, and graduated summa cum laude with a 3.91 cumulative GPA.
Dr. Lally Shields went on to apply that same Academic All-America® determination and pioneering spirit to the world of medicine, becoming an ophthalmologist specializing in cancer of the eye. One of just a handful of ocular oncologists in the United States, she and her husband Jerry Shields head the largest eye cancer center in the country, the Ocular Oncology Service of Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. Her research—she’s written or co-written five textbooks and published more than 700 articles in major medical journals—has helped develop life- and eye-saving treatments for retinoblastoma, a rare, potentially deadly eye cancer that mostly affects children under the age of three.
Born: Bryn Mawr, PA
High School: Kennedy Christian (Sharon, PA)
Occupation: Opthamologist