Dr. Dorothy Shippen

University Distinguished Professor and Regents Fellow of Biochemistry & Biophysics in the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences

Dr. Shippen earned her doctorate in biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Shippen pioneered the use of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana as a model for understanding the structure and function of telomeres, and the telomerase enzyme. Her research has been continuously funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation with additional support from private and state funding agencies. Dr. Shippen currently serves as a Co-PI on the NIH T32 training grant, “IMSD at Texas A&M University: Initiative for maximizing student diversity in biomedical sciences”. Dr. Shippen has presented more than 125 invited lectures on her telomere research and has published 93 peer-reviewed research articles, reviews, commentaries and book chapters (h-index =43; i10-index = 75). In addition to numerous awards for her research, Dr. Shippen received the Texas A&M Association of Former Students’ Distinguished Achievement Award for Graduate Mentoring and the Rose Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for outstanding contributions to biochemical and molecular biological research and commitment to training younger scientists.

Dr. Shippen participated as an Instructor for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund/Howard Hughes Medical Institute Laboratory Management Course, and conducted NSF-funded research on best practices in laboratory management. She teaches a graduate course on scientific leadership and has conducted numerous workshops at Texas A&M and at other venues on this topic. In her laboratory, Dr. Shippen has mentored more than 110 undergraduate students, hosted 10 international visiting scientists, guided three graduate students to MS degrees and 22 graduate students to Ph.D. degrees, and trained 19 postdoctoral fellows who are now in academic, industry or teaching institutions. Dr. Shippen was named a Texas A&M Advance Diversity Champion and recently served on the Texas A&M President’s Commission on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She is currently a member of the University of Distinguished Professors Executive Committee and the Advisory Board for the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.