Prof Shelli McAlpine

About Professor Shelli: Shelli R McAlpine, Ph.D. was born in Redding, CA, USA, and she grew up in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Australia. She earned her B.Sc degree in chemistry at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (1991). She worked at Merck as a medicinal chemist (1991-1993) and then earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with Miguel Garcia-Garibay (1993-1997). Her post-doc training in medicinal chemistry/chemical biology was at Harvard University with Prof. Stuart Schreiber (1997-2000).

In 2000 she joined the chemistry faculty at San Diego State University (SDSU) and she became a tenured, Full Professor in 2010 having set up her own drug discovery program. In 2011 she accepted an academic position at the University of New South Wales, Sydney (UNSW), where, in addition to her research program she was the undergraduate research director for 6 years and the Medicinal Chemistry Program director for 3 years. Shelli resides in Sydney, Australia, while being engaged as a Visiting Professor at University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the Chemistry Department and a handling editor for Bioorganic Chemistry, thus maintaining her international scientific presence.

Shelli has served on the American Chemical Society (ACS) executive committees for Organic and Medicinal Chemistry and is currently active on the ACS International Committee. She has also worked on the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) on the Med Chem and Chem Bio division co-running several conferences. She has played an active role on 24 NIH funding panels, reviewed ARC and NHMRC grants, and refereed over 800 research papers. She has mentored and graduated 53 post-graduate students, and over 100 undergraduates have participated in her research. She has earned 18 teaching and mentoring awards, and has earned respect for her continual high student evaluations.