Mary Collins

Education Collins was born in Reading, England and grew up in Cheltenham Spa, attending Cheltenham Ladies' College as a day girl. She won an entrance scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where she studied Natural Sciences (Biochemistry). She did her postgraduate research work supervised by Enrique Rozengurt at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund for which she was awarded a PhD by the University of London in 1983.

Career and research After her PhD, she moved to a postdoctoral fellowship with Avrion Mitchison at University College London studying the locations of T cell receptor gene clusters, and next worked with Richard C. Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed retroviral vectors expressing cytokines and cytokine receptors.

Collins was among the prominent UCL women scientists featured in a series of interviews published by the MRC in celebration of International Women's Day in 2011 and was one of two UCL women to participate in a women in science event in collaboration with Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2012. In December 2015, it was announced that Professor Collins would become Dean of Research at the Okinawa Institute of Technology. Forbes Magazine speculated that she would supervise of $110m in Japanese government funding at the Institute. She was appointed Provost in 2018 and lead the University's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In October 2022, she returned to London to take up the post of Director of the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London.

Collins' research group studies the use of viruses, particularly lentiviruses (the group to which the human immunodeficiency virus belongs), as vectors for delivering novel genes to cells and as platforms for the development of vaccines.

Awards and honours Collins was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci)in 1999.

Personal Collins married Tim Hunt in 1995, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, and knighted in 2006. They have two children.