Sharon Ann Hunt was brought up in Cleveland, Ohio, and completed her early education from the undergraduate school at the University of Dayton.
She spent her summer breaks in a research laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic, sparking her interest in cardiology and subsequent entry to the study of medicine.
[1] Hunt began her medical career as one of seven female students in her class at Stanford in 1967, the year prior to the landmark heart transplant procedure by Norman Shumway.
[2] As a medical student, Hunt became involved in research observing the effects of several drugs on heart muscle cells in tissue culture, a project that introduced her to many of the cardiac trainees at Stanford at that time.
[1] Hunt received a medical degree in 1972, completed a residency in internal medicine in 1974, and finished a cardiology fellowship in 1977, all at Stanford University.
[2][4] As a second-year medical student, she has recounted the first heart transplant procedure in the US as "groundbreaking...very exciting" when "the whole place was abuzz with the news of it".
Over the previous decade, surgical techniques, including endomyocardial biopsy use for early transplant rejection, were improved at Stanford, under Norman Shumway.
[2] The care of people who had survived the initial stages of heart transplant surgery became the focus of Hunt's research and work.
She later recalled; When patients started living longer, the surgeons felt they needed real doctors to take care of them because they would come in for follow up with all sorts of medical complications of long-term immunosuppression.
[4] In her paper on mechanical circulatory support in 2007, she stated that the grading of “transplant ineligible” at one moment in time is not automatically a permanent decision.