Professor Michelle Coote is a graduate of the University of New South Wales, where she completed a B.Sc. (Hons) in industrial chemistry (1995), followed by a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry (2000). Following postdoctoral work at the University of Durham, UK, she joined the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University in 2001, initially as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Leo Radom. She established her own research group in 2004 and was promoted to Professor in 2011. She has published extensively in the fields of polymer chemistry, radical chemistry and computational quantum chemistry, and is a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science.

Michelle has received many awards including the 2001 IUPAC prize for young scientists, the RACI Cornforth medal (2000), Rennie medal (2006) David Sangster Polymer Science and Technology Achievement Award (2010) and HG Smith medal (2016), the Le Fevre Memorial Prize of the Australian Academy of Science (2010) and the Pople Medal of the Asia-Pacific Association for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (2015). In 2014, she was elected to the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2017 she was awarded a Georgina Sweet ARC Laureate Fellowship. She is also currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.