Shelly Peyton is a professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Northwestern University in 2002 and went on to obtain her master’s degree and doctorate in chemical engineering from UCI in 2007. She was then an NIH Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow in the Biological Engineering Department at MIT before starting her academic appointment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011. She moved to Tufts University in 2024.

At Tufts, Peyton leads an interdisciplinary group of engineers and molecular cell biologists seeking to create and apply novel biomaterials platforms toward new solutions to grand challenges in human health. Her lab’s unique approach is using their engineering expertise to build simplified models of human tissue with synthetic biomaterials. They use these systems to understand 1) the physical relationship between metastatic breast cancer cells and the tissues to which they spread, 2) the role of the extracellular matrix and its dynamics in drug resistance, and 3) how to create bioinspired, mechanically dynamic and activatable biomaterials.

Among other honors, Peyton was a 2013 Pew Biomedical Scholar, received a New Innovator Award from the NIH, and was awarded an NSF CAREER grant. She is a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Peyton is passionate about graduate student training and diversifying the academy. She was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Engineering at UMass in 2018, has led an REU Site, co-directed a Biotechnology NIH T32 training program, and was lead principal investigator of a PREP program at UMass, which hosts students from historically excluded groups for a one-year research-intensive program to help prepare them for graduate school. She also runs an NSF-funded program called Engineering the Cell, which brings female high school students to her lab for five weeks every summer.
Outside of her work, Peyton is an avid cyclist, enjoys board games, travel and is a retired ultimate frisbee player.