Mary Katharine Levinge Collins, Lady Hunt is a British Professor of virology and the director of the Queen Mary University of London Blizard Institute. She served as Provost at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology 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.
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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.