From sea slugs to bipolar biomarkers: Mary Phillips's four-decade quest to read the brain before it breaks

She was fourteen and standing in a biology class in Nottingham, England, arguing that the brain was superior to every other organ in the body. You could transplant a heart, a kidney, a liver. You could not transplant the brain. Her teachers disapproved. Her classmates shifted uncomfortably.

Four decades later, Dr. Mary L. Phillips holds the Pittsburgh Foundation-Emmerling Endowed Chair in Psychotic Disorders, has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications, and directs three research centers at the University of Pittsburgh dedicated to a single question: can you detect bipolar disorder in the brain's circuitry before symptoms appear?

The sea slug that changed everything

The path was not linear. In medical school, while classmates chose predictable intercalated degrees in pathology or anatomy, Phillips chose zoology. In the laboratory, she encountered Aplysia - the sea slug whose simple neural network had become a model for understanding how circuits produce behavior. The fascination stuck. It sent her into a master's in neuroscience, which she calls one of the best decisions she ever made.

She trained in neurology, found psychiatry more compelling, worried that psychiatry did not take neuroscience seriously enough, and nearly committed to neurology for good. Then a senior colleague mentioned a subspecialty she had never heard of: neuropsychiatry. That conversation redirected her career to the Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry in London.

Reading the circuit before the storm

Phillips's central research ambition is to identify abnormalities in prefrontal-striatal-limbic circuitry that serve as biomarkers for bipolar disorder before symptoms manifest. Her team tracks the development of large-scale neural networks from infancy through young adulthood, mapping emotional reactivity patterns that may predispose individuals to future illness.

She now directs three Pittsburgh centers: CNCTI-P for interventional psychiatry, CENTRIM-BD for metabolic psychiatry, and CRTDAN for translational and developmental neuroscience. Recently, her lab has begun collaborating with biotech companies to examine neurobiological mechanisms underlying novel neuromodulation and metabolic interventions, working to optimize treatments at the individual level.

"I have spent many years as a psychiatrist being frustrated at the lack of treatment options for patients with terribly debilitating psychiatric illnesses," she said. "It is, I believe, only now that the technology is available to meet this ambitious goal."

Four mentors, four inflections

Phillips tells her career story through people rather than positions. Professor David Foster taught her research methodology and scientific writing. Professor Jeffrey Gray introduced her to functional MRI when the technology was still raw, but his deeper lesson was about listening to colleagues. Professor David Kupfer invited her across the Atlantic to Pittsburgh. And Professor Lori Altshuler, a consultant on her first major American grant, became both mentor and friend before dying - Phillips speaks of her with the particular tenderness reserved for people who showed you how to work while running out of time themselves.

The cost and the counterweight

Phillips does not soften her account of being a woman in this field. "There was a clear disadvantage to being a woman during the early years of my career, for all the obvious, sexist reasons," she states. But there was a counterweight: visibility. She was never anonymous. And being a woman, she believes, helped foster a mentoring style that her trainees came to rely on.

She has mentored more than 100 trainees, including 15 NIH K awardees. She received the 2023 ACNP Women's Advocacy Award and the Society of Biological Psychiatry Gold Medal in 2024.

Asked to name her greatest achievement, Phillips does not cite the National Academy or the Gold Medal or the 400 papers. She says: moving to the United States and building a research team. It is the answer of someone who understands that discoveries belong to the moment, but that the people you train carry the work forward.

Her life philosophy fits on a napkin. Seven words: goals and routes - never confuse the two.