[4] After obtaining her medical degree at the University of Manitoba in 1936, she went into general practice from 1939 to 1944 and ran successfully for the Winnipeg School Board in 1942.

In that position, Sheps was a key contributor to the Sigerist Report,[6][7][8] which led to Saskatchewan enacting the first government hospital insurance plan in North America in 1945.

[2] In addition to her academic career, she served as an adviser to the Government of India through the Ford Foundation and held an advisory role at World Health Organization.

[1] The Mindel C. Sheps Award, a collaborative project of the Population Association of America (PAA) and the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, is awarded every two years to honor exceptional achievements in mathematical demography or demographic methodology to candidates who demonstrate exemplary professional ethics and standards.

In epidemiology and biostatistics, Sheps' 1958 paper "Shall we count the living or the dead" contains one of the earliest discussions of challenges that arise from the asymmetry of the relative risk,[10] a phenomenon that may make the effect estimate sensitive to whether it is based on the probability of the outcome, or the probability of not having the outcome.