Annette Salmeen
Annette Elizabeth Salmeen is an American biochemist, a 1997 Rhodes Scholar and became a gold medalist at the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Swimming career
She was a competitive swimmer by the age of 9, and became a standout swimmer at Huron High School in Ann Arbor, where she was co-captain of the girls' swimming team for two years. While at Huron, Salmeen was three-time state champion in the 500-yard freestyle, and once in the 100-yard butterfly. Salmeen went on to swim at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a co-captain, four-time All-American, and an NCAA national champion in the 200-yard butterfly. She won a bronze medal in the 200-meter butterfly at the 1995 World University Games in Fukuoka, Japan. Salmeen qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, where she earned a gold medal for swimming for the U.S. team in the preliminary heats of the women's 4×200-meter freestyle relay. In individual competition at the Olympics, she finished 4th in the B Final in the women's 200-meter butterfly.
Salmeen graduated from UCLA in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a Doctorate of Philosophy in biochemistry at Oxford University. During her four years at St John's College, Oxford, she was a member of the Oxford University Swimming Club, where she set three long-course records and six on the short-course.
She earned her doctorate in 2001, and returned to the U.S. as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. In 2005, she was named to the board of the United States Anti-Doping Agency and again came back to Stanford University in 2022 where she teaches and is a course coordinator in the Human Biology programme. She also teaches Health, Biology and Big Data at Stanford University. In addition to her athletic and academic work, Salmeen published important work on redox regulation of cysteine-based phosphates. She also completed a 2005 review in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling.