She works as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was head of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science from 2014 to 2022.

[1] She earned her Ph.D. in 1995 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Haynes Miller, for her work on the convergence of the homology spectral sequence of a cosimplicial space.

[1] In 2009, Shipley became Co-Principal Investigator on UIC's National Science Foundation's ADVANCE grant to support the Women in Science and Engineering System Transformation (WISEST) program.

[4] She served as an American Mathematical Society Council member at large from 2018 to 2020.

"[2] Then in 2016, she became a representative of the Committee of Academic Sponsors at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute[6] She and John Greenlees were the joint winners of the 2022 Senior Berwick Prize for their paper "An algebraic model for rational torus-equivariant spectra".