Professor Molly Shoichet is University Professor, the University of Toronto’s highest academic rank and a distinction held by less than 2% of the faculty.

She has actively engaged in translational research and science outreach. She co-Founded AmacaThera in 2016 and serves as CSO, taking an invention from her lab into clinical trials in 2021. She served as Ontario’s first Chief Scientist in 2018 where she worked to enhance the culture of science.

Professor Shoichet has published over 650 papers, patents, and abstracts and has given over 420 lectures worldwide. She currently leads a laboratory of 30 and has graduated 220 researchers. Her research is focused on drug and cell delivery strategies in the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer.

Professor Shoichet is the recipient of over 50 prestigious distinctions and the only person to be inducted into all three of Canada’s National Academies of Science of the Royal Society of Canada, Engineering, and Health Sciences.

In 2018, Professor Shoichet was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2011, she was awarded the Order of Ontario. She was the recipient of the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for North America in 2015, elected Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016, winner of the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2017, elected to the Royal Society (UK) in 2019, and awarded the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal in 2020. Dr. Shoichet received her SB from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (1992).