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 and community clinic settings, which inform her team's approach to public health problems.

Her research has been published in 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 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 presents on drug checking in academic and community settings. Dr. Shover received the Helping End Addiction Long-term Initiative Director's Trailblazer Award (2023) and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Community Partner Values Award (2025). As an educator, Dr. Shover mentors 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), founded by Dr. Shover in 2022, offers free, anonymous drug checking to characterize the local illicit drug supply in close to real time. DCLA runs five weekly sessions at four sites in Los Angeles County and has tested thousands of drug samples. 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.