Chelsea L. Shover, PhD is an Associate Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where she directs the Epidemiology, Policy, and Implementation Lab (EPI Lab). She founded Drug Checking Los Angeles in 2022 to gain timely, actionable insight into the illicit drug supply. Dr. Shover completed her PhD in epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Alongside her academic research, Dr. Shover has worked in local government, community clinics, and policy advising capacities, all of which inform her team's approach to urgent and complex public health problems.

Her research has been published in top academic journals including Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Addiction, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and The International Journal of Drug Policy. Her lab's work is currently funded by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration. She regularly presents insights from drug checking in academic and community settings around the world. Dr. Shover's approach to drug checking as a population health strategy has been honored with the Helping End Addiction Long-term Initiative Director's Trailblazer Award in 2023 and a Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Community Partner Values Award in 2025. As an educator, Dr. Shover is especially committed to mentoring trainees from backgrounds underrepresented in science, including people with personal experience of substance use disorders and mental illness.

The lab's current work centers on two projects.

Drug Checking Los Angeles (DCLA) is the lab's flagship project. Founded by Dr. Shover in 2022, DCLA offers free, anonymous drug checking to characterize the local illicit drug supply in close to real time. For current testing locations, results, and DCLA's own publications, visit drugcheckinglosangeles.com.

LA County Overdose Surveillance is an NIH-funded project (R01DA057630, PIs Shover and Goodman-Meza, 2022-2027) building a Rapid Overdose Surveillance Dashboard to track fatal and non-fatal overdose across Los Angeles County. A public dashboard predicting overdose hotspots, to help target street-based response, is in development and will be added to this site later in 2026.