She holds affiliated appointments in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Department of Bioengineering at George Mason University. She received her B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University in Houston, TX, where she was an NIH fellow of the Nanobiology Training Program of the Gulf Coast Consortia. Shehu's research contributions are in computational structural biology, biophysics, and bioinformatics with a focus on issues concerning the relationship between sequence, structure, dynamics, and function in biological molecules. Shehu is the recent recipient of an NSF CAREER award for her research on probabilistic search algorithms for protein conformational spaces.