Dr Tamsin Kelly completed a PhD in forensic toxicology at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in 2004 before undertaking a two year post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Baltimore (USA). Her post-doctoral research involved the development of a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) method for the identification and quantification of novel methamphetamine and amphetamine related markers in meconium.

Tamsin has had extensive experience in the development of analytical methods (such as LC-MS-MS and capillary electrophoresis (CE)) for the detection of drugs in various biological specimens, including plasma, urine, hair, dried blood spots and meconium. She was also a member of the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Drug Testing team at the Australian Sports Drug Testing Laboratory (Pymble, NSW).

Following an appointment as Lecturer/Course Coordinator of Forensic and Analytical Chemistry at Curtin University of Technology (2006 – 2009), Tamsin relocated to University of Canberra within Forensic Studies and the National Centre for Forensic Studies. In 2019 Tamsin was appointed Associate Dean of Education for the Faculty of Science and Technology.

Tamsin is an active researcher with a number of undergraduate, Honours, and PhD research students under her supervision. She is a lead Chief Investigator on a CRC-P grant: Next generation dried blood spot pathology testing using LC-MS (Department of Industry, Innovation and Science) along with Simon Foster, University of Canberra). Collaboration partners for this grant are MyHealthTest Pty Ltd, ANZAC Research Institute and Agilent Technologies.

She is an active member in the Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society (ANZFSS; serving as an ACT Branch committee member 2012 - 2014), The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists (TIAFT) and Forensic & Clinical Toxicology Association (FACTA).

Research interests

• forensic toxicology
• application of analytical chemistry to forensic and allied health related analyses
• chemical education