Person

Gething, Mary-Jane

AO

Occupation
Molecular biologist and University Administrator

Summary

Mary-Jane Gething spent twenty years carrying out research in protein chemistry and molecular biology at Cambridge and London, England, and New York and Dallas, USA. She returned to Melbourne in 1998, taking up the position of Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne. From the mid-1980s Gething and her colleague (and future husband) Joseph Sambrook undertook ground-breaking studies on the characterization of molecular chaperones and the unfolded protein response. Other significant achievements include producing a clone of a protein which breaks down blood clots, the tissue plasminogen activator. A keen supporter of, and advocate for, young women in the biomedical sciences, Gething established the M.-J. Gething Gender Equality Award at the School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Melbourne.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1973 - 1975
Career position - Researcher, Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom
1974
Education - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Melbourne
1975 - 1982
Career position - Researcher, Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory, London, United Kingdom
1982 - 1985
Career position - Researcher, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, U.S.A.
1985 - 1994
Career position - Researcher, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Department of Biochemistry, Southwestern Medical Center, University of Texas, U.S.A.
1994 - 1998
Career position - Reader, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Melbourne
1998 - 2005
Career position - Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Melbourne
2000 - 2005
Career position - Head, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Melbourne
2005 -
Career position - Emeritus Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Melbourne
2023
Award - Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to biochemistry and molecular biology, to tertiary education, and to the arts

Related Corporate Bodies

Archival resources

National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection

  • Biographical cuttings on Mary Jane Gething, Cuttings Files BIOG; National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection. Details

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

  • McCarthy, Gavan; Morgan, Helen; Smith, Ailie; van den Bosch, Alan, Where are the Women in Australian Science?, Exhibition of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, First published 2003 with lists updated regularly edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, 2003, https://eoas.info/exhibitions/wisa/wisa.html. Details

Edited Books

  • Gething, Mary-Jane ed., Guidebook to the molecular chaperones and protein-folding catalysts (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 554 pp. Details

Resources

Resource Sections

See also

  • Herd, Margaret ed., Who's who in Australia 2002 (Melbourne: Crown Content, 2001), 2020 pp. Details

Ailie Smith

Created: 13 February 2003, Last modified: 3 March 2026

EOAS ID: biogs/P004248b.htm

This Edition: 2026 February - 1926 Centenaries
Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - Late summer: late January to late March - season of eels
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-kooyang-season-of-eels

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P004248b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260