Dr. Melinda Sheffield-Moore earned her bachelor’s degree in exercise science from Texas A&M University. After earning her master’s degree in exercise physiology from the University of Houston, she spent four years at NASA Johnson Space Center as an experiment support scientist, training astronauts to conduct experiments in human physiology and medicine. She later earned her doctorate in human bioenergetics and physiology at Ball State University.
She returned to Texas to complete a NIH funded post-doctoral fellowship in trauma, burns, and metabolism at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) within the Department of Surgery and Shriners Burns Hospital. While there she completed her training in human metabolism and skeletal muscle biology, and undertook clinical studies examining the influence of burns, aging, cancer, and space flight on protein and amino acid metabolism in skeletal muscle.
During her 20-year career as a tenured Professor in the Department of Medicine at UTMB she held numerous key leadership roles in the medical school including as the director of the Translational Technologies Key Resource for the Institute of Translational Sciences and as a Program Director of the Institute of Translational Sciences Human Clinical Research Center. She has been funded throughout her career by the National Institutes of Aging, National Cancer Institute, NASA, and through foundation grants to support her human clinical research program in areas of aging, cancer, space flight, and traumatic brain injury.
In 2017, Dr. Sheffield-Moore accepted a position at her alma mater as Professor and head of the department of Health & Kinesiology at Texas A&M. In August 2021, after completing her 4-year administrative term, she returned to University of Texas Medical Branch to serve as Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.