Shabnam was born and raised in Tehran, Iran, where she first discovered her love of chemistry as a high school student. She earned her B.S. degree in chemistry from the National University of Iran and her M.S. degree in inorganic chemistry from Sharif University of Technology. In 2010, she joined the research group of Professor Ken Karlin at Johns Hopkins University, studying biologically inspired coordination chemistry of heme/Cu systems and their reactions with nitrogen oxides, including nitric oxide, nitrite, and hyponitrite.

After completing her Ph.D., Shabnam began a postdoctoral position in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Fall 2015, where she worked with Professor Jonas Peters on the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to carbon-based fuels. In 2017, she moved to the research group of Professor Harry Gray, focusing on mechanistic studies of O₂ reactivity in blue Thermus thermophilus laccase.

Shabnam launched her independent academic career in Fall 2018 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Her research group developed programs in bioinorganic chemistry, natural product-inspired energy science, and molecular redox catalysis, with an emphasis on understanding and controlling unique electron-transfer processes in photocatalytic, protein-based, and electrochemical systems.

In 2022, she received the Bernard-Glickman Dean’s Professorship at UNCG and was awarded the Arthur E. Martell Early Career Researcher Prize from the Journal of Coordination Chemistry. Her interdisciplinary work has also been recognized with several prestigious honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, a DOE Early Career Award, an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA), and a 2024 UNC Research Opportunities Initiative (ROI) award, which supported the launch of the Nature Inspired Collaborative Energy Research (NICER) initiative.

In July 2025, Shabnam and her group moved to Virginia Tech, where she continues to lead an interdisciplinary team investigating redox-driven processes in biological and energy-relevant systems.

Outside the lab, Shabnam enjoys spending time with her husband and their young son, Parsa. She loves catching up with friends and family across the globe, sampling new coffees and teas, traveling, and cooking Persian food. Food is a big part of Iranian culture and serves as a catalyst that brings people together, while also giving her a little taste of home.