Mary E. Brunkow

Mary Elizabeth Brunkow is an American molecular biologist, immunologist and Nobel Prize laureate, born in Portland, Oregon, on April 13, 1961. She graduated from St. Mary Academy in Portland in 1979, received a Bachelor of Science in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Washington in 1983 and a Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biology from Princeton University in 1991 under Shirley M. Tilghman, with a dissertation on the H19 gene in transgenic mice. She worked in industry research in the Seattle area at Celltech R&D in Bothell, Washington, where she and Fred Ramsdell did the work on FOXP3 that later won the Nobel Prize, and she later became senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. She is known for co-identifying the gene later named FOXP3 as the cause of the scurfy mouse phenotype, a finding foundational for regulatory T cell biology, and in 2025 she was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for work on peripheral immune tolerance.