Shipley grew up in Buckinghamshire, where she attended Dr Challoner's High School for Girls. She graduated with an MMathinMathematics from St Hugh's College, University of Oxford and was awarded a doctorate from the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford in 2008 for her thesis "Multiscale Modelling of Fluid and Drug Transport in Vascular Tumours".[3]
Her first postdoctoral position was a prestigious Research Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford to develop mathematical and computational models that describe biomechanical and biochemical stimulation of tissues. She also held two concurrent Visiting Research Fellowships at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Bath, and Tissue Repair and Engineering Centre, UCL during that time.[3]
In 2012, Shipley moved from mathematics into bioengineering, taking up a Lectureship in UCL Mechanical Engineering. Her research is predominantly divided into two themes: tumour blood flow and nervous system tissue engineering.
Within the field of tumour blood flow and therapy prediction, she is developing new bioengineering platforms which combine computational modelling with in vivo and ex vivo imaging data to better understand and interrogate cancer therapies.[4] Her work advancing cancer therapies has been recognised in the national press.[5]
Within nervous system tissue engineering, she has developed an interdisciplinary programme spanning bioengineering, computational modelling and tissue engineering to characterise the response of repairing nerves to chemical and mechanical stimuli, and integrate these data to design and test repair constructs. This is complemented by her work using computational modelling to understand the role of biochemical and biophysical stimuli, and define operating parameters, in tissue engineering development.
In 2017 she co-founded the UCL Centre for Nerve Engineering, the first Centre in the UK to bring together engineering and physical sciences with the life and clinical sciences to tackle translational nerve engineering problem.[6]
In March 2020, Shipley was one of the main leads of the UCL / UCL Hospitals / Mercedes F1 effort to develop, manufacture and distribute the Ventura non-invasive breathing mask to provide crucial machines to help patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.[7][8][9][10] The design was made open source and to date over 1,800 teams from 105 countries have taken licences and 20 have manufactured their own prototypes to test.[9]
