Professor Michelle Coote is a graduate of the University of New South Wales, where she completed a BSc (Hons) in industrial chemistry in 1995, followed by a PhD in polymer chemistry in 2000. Following postdoctoral work at the University of Durham, UK, she joined the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, in 2001. She established her own research group in 2004 and was promoted to Professor in 2011.

Professor Coote has published extensively in the fields of polymer chemistry, radical chemistry and computational quantum chemistry, and is a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science.

She has received many awards including the 2001 IUPAC Prize for Young Scientists; the RACI Cornforth Medal (2000), Rennie Medal (2006) and David Sangster Polymer Science and Technology Achievement Award (2010); the Le Fèvre Memorial Prize of the Australian Academy of Science (2010); and the Pople Medal of the Asia-Pacific Association for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (2015). In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.