Mary Mullins is professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) since 1995 and vice chair (2013) for the Department of Developmental Biology and Assistant Dean (2019) for Junior Faculty Advancement. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2016).

Mary has become a leading scientist in the field of genetics and developmental biology. She started her research career in the zebrafish field as a postdoc when she joined the lab of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen. Here, Mary performed pioneering work to establish methods for the first large scale mutagenesis screens in zebrafish in which she participated. The large-scale Tübingen screen led by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, which together with the Boston screen led by Wolfgang Driever screen, resulted in 37 articles in a special issue of Development in 1996 describing over 1.000 zebrafish mutants that were foundational to the zebrafish field.  Mary became an independent researcher in 1995 by establishing her own research group at UPenn. Here, she studied the dorsalized mutants from the Tübingen screen and provided important new insights into how a gradient of BMP (Bone Morphogenetic Protein) signal transduction establishes the dorsoventral axis. More recently, she led a large-scale maternal-effect mutant screen in zebrafish, not previously performed in a vertebrate, to identify mutants of key genes specifically required in the mother for oocyte development, egg activation, fertilization, the mid-blastula transition, and establishment of the axes of the vertebrate embryo.

Besides her research contributions, Mary has been activity engaged in training the next generation of scientists. She is active in training graduate students as chair of the UPenn DSRB graduate program and she has trained over 20 postdocs of which many became independent researchers. As an Assistant Dean for Junior Faculty Advancement, she supports assistant professors in advancing their independent research careers and achieving tenure. Mary’s commitment to train the next generation of zebrafish researchers is exemplified by her contributions as co-director (2005-2008) and teacher (until present) to the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) Zebrafish development and genetics course.

Mary has been very engaged in promoting and facilitating research using the zebrafish model. She served on numerous committees promoting zebrafish research and served as Vice President  (2014-2017) and President (2018-2019) of the International Zebrafish Society (IZFS). In addition to this, she holds a number of editorial positions of which her position as Associate Editor with PLOS Genetics is probably best known to most of us. Taken together, Mary’s contributions as an advocate of the zebrafish model had a large impact on the acceptance of the zebrafish model as a major vertebrate model for genetic research.