Professor Mala Shah obtained a First Class (Hons) BSc in Pharmacology from the University of Bath, followed by a PhD at the Department of Pharmacology, University College London during which time she carried out work on characterising the slow afterhyperpolarization in hippocampal neurons. She subsequently won a Wellcome International Prize Travel Research Fellowship to work in Professor Daniel Johnston’s laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine (Texas, USA) where she started her work on understanding ion channel properties and function in entorhinal cortical dendrites under physiologic and epileptic conditions. In 2004, she returned to the Department of Pharmacology, University College London as a Senior Research Fellow in Professor David Brown’s laboratory and continued her studies on the functional significance of subcellular distribution of ion channels in hippocampal and cortical neurons during normal and epileptogenic conditions through funding received from the Wellcome Trust and Epilepsy Research Foundation. In 2007 she won the prestigious MRC New Investigator Award and joined the Pharmacology Department at UCL School of Pharmacy as a lecturer. In 2010, she obtained the esteemed ERC Starter Independent Grant.