ShellI R. McAlpine

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) performing undergraduate research with Eric Jacobsen. She worked at Merck as a medicinal chemist (1991-1993) and then earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at 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 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, 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. In 2020 she became a Visiting Professor at University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the Chemistry Department and a handling editor for the journal Bioorganic Chemistry.

Shelli has served on the American Chemical Society (ACS) executive committees for Organic and Medicinal Chemistry and is currently serving on the ACS International Committee. Her research interests are in medicinal chemistry with a focus on cancer drug development aimed at heat shock proteins (chaperones). Specifically, she designs and develops new anti-cancer agents and evaluates them for their binding affinity, toxicity, selectively, mechanism of action, solubility and permeability.