Dr. Relling earned her undergraduate B.S. degree from the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy and her doctoral degree from the University of Utah College of Pharmacy. She completed post-doctoral fellowships with Dr. William Evans at St. Jude and with Dr. Urs Meyer at University of Basel. She joined St. Jude as a faculty member in 1988, and in 2003 was named chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. She is also a professor at the University of Tennessee in the Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy.
Her primary interests are in treatment and pharmacogenetics of childhood leukemia and clinical implementation of pharmacogenetic testing. Dr. Relling is Chair of NIH’s Pharmacogenomics Research Network and co-founder of CPIC, the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium. She has published over 300 original scientific manuscripts. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2009.