Shelli R McAlpine was born in the USA. She grew up in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Shelli earned her Chemistry B.Sc. degree at the University of Illinois, she worked as a medicinal chemist at Merck and Co for 18 months, and then earned her Ph.D. at UCLA. She did post-doc training at Harvard University.
She joined the chemistry faculty at San Diego State University in 2000, becoming a tenured Professor in 2010. From 2011-2020 she was an academic at the University of New South Wales. During Covid Shelli served as a Visiting Professor at University of California, Irvine and as an editor for the Elsevier Journal Bioorganic Chemistry. In 2021 she started her own company that supported academics writing grants, and in November 2022, she expanded her business to include businesses and charities.
