Mary Collins (immunologist)

For other people named Mary Collins, see Mary Collins (disambiguation).

Mary Collins
Nationality	British
Fields	Immunology
Institutions	University College London
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Academic advisors	Enrique Rozengurt
Known for	Development of lentivirus viral vectors
Spouse	Tim Hunt
Children	2 daughters, born c. 1996 and 2000
Website https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=MKLCO33

Mary Collins is a British Professor of Immunology. She is Dean of Research at the Okinawa Institute in Japan. Formerly, Collins taught in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, and was the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology. Her research group studies the use of viruses as vectors for introducing new genes into cells, which can be useful for experimental cell biology, for clinical applications such as gene therapy, and as cancer vaccines.

Academic career

Collins was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, where she studied biochemistry. She did her PhD work under the supervision of Enrique Rozengurt at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with Avrion Mitchison at University College London and with Richard C. Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Collins started her research group in 1987 at the Institute of Cancer Research in London and moved in 1997 to University College London, where she has since held a variety of leadership positions. She served as the head of UCL Immunology & Molecular Pathology from 2000 to 2007, became Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology in 2005, became Director of the UCL Division of Infection & Immunity in 2008, and served as the Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences between 2009 and 2014. She stepped down as dean to become the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control.

Collins is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, United Kingdom. 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.

Research

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. Because lentiviruses like HIV specifically infect immune cells called T-cells, a genetically engineered inactivated version of the virus can be used to deliver immunogenic proteins to T-cells to induce an immune response. This system has been studied successfully in laboratory mice.

During her PhD, she gathered evidence that cell proliferation is stimulated by phorbol esters that interact with protein kinase C. Her post-doc research with Av Mitchison, at University College London, focused on identifying locations of the TCR gene on the chromosomes. Following this, Mary worked with Richard Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, where she made retroviral vectors that expressed cytokines and cytokine receptors.

Personal

Collins is married to fellow scientist Tim Hunt, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001. They have two children.