Emeritus Professor Angela Dulhunty graduated from The University of Sydney in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree and Honours in Physiology. She obtained her PhD from the University of New South Wales in 1973, presenting a thesis on muscle electrophysiology under the guidance of Professor Peter Gage. Awarded a Muscular Dystrophy Postdoctoral Fellowship, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Rochester with Professors Paul Horowicz, Clara Franzini-Armstrong, and Camillo Peracchia. Returning to Australia in 1975, she established a Muscle Research Laboratory in the Department of Anatomy at The University of Sydney. In 1982, alongside Professors Peter Gage and Peter Parry, she was instrumental in the establishment of a Centre of Excellence for Nerve Muscle Research at the University of New South Wales, which later moved to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in 1984. Her extensive research into muscle excitation-contraction coupling (ECC) earned her a DSc degree from the University of New South Wales in 1988. Professor Dulhunty was appointed to an Emeritus position at ANU in 2017 and was awarded an AM (Australian Medal) in 2022 for her contributions to medical research and student training.

Professor Dulhunty's research has focused on the translation of electrical signals in the surface membrane of muscle fibres into the release of calcium ions from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR), facilitating muscle contraction through excitation-contraction coupling (ECC). Her PhD work delved into the complex nature of transverse (T-) tubule extensions of the surface membrane, which conduct electrical signals throughout the fibre cross-section. She discovered asymmetric charge movement from dihydropyridine receptors in T-tubules, allowing her to examine this voltage sensor for ECC in fast and slow-twitch mammalian muscle, and explore the voltage dependence of ECC. In the late 1980s, she was among the first to study single ryanodine receptor (RyR) ion channels from skeletal and cardiac muscle using lipid bilayer electrophysiology. Her ongoing research combines electrophysiology, biochemistry, protein chemistry, structural biology, and molecular biology to investigate normal RyR function and pathological changes that impair skeletal muscle function and compromise cardiac muscle, potentially leading to heart attacks.