Mary Beckerle

Mary Catherine Beckerle was born in Rivers Edge, New Jersey to Martin and Mickey Beckerle. She is the oldest of three daughters. Her father worked at the New York Telephone Co. and died at the age of 36 of emphysema. Her mother was a registered nurse. After high school, Beckerle attended Wells College in New York, where she earned a B. A. in Biology and Psychology. She graduated magna cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Before continuing her education, she took a year off and worked in a cellular biology research laboratory at University of Texas Southwest Medical Center. After this, she attended the University of Colorado Boulder where she earned a PhD. in Molecular Biology. Her education then continued at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Anatomy and Cell Biology.

Beckerle joined the University of Utah faculty as an assistant professor of biology. She continued at the University of Utah and was one of the first professors to move into the Huntsman Cancer Institute when it opened in 1999. Also in 1999, she was awarded the Ralph E. and Willa T. Main Presidential Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the University of Utah. She led a program specializing in cancer cell biology until 2003. In 2003, she was named the deputy director of the center. In 2006, she was named the CEO and the director of Huntsman Cancer Institute. In 2009, she was also named the Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs at the University of Utah. She holds the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah, where she has also been promoted to a distinguished professorship in the biology department.

In 1990, Beckerle was on the editorial board of Molecular Biology of the cell. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Curie Institute in Paris in 1999. In 2006, Beckerle was the president of the American Society of Cell Biology. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. In 2013, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. Beckerle was elected to the American Philosophical Society in the April 2017 group of inductees that also included Barack Obama. She was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020.

She is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.

While at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Beckerle met David Murrell. She would go on to marry him. The couple shares one son.