Mary L. Phillips, MD, MD (Cantab), Pittsburgh Foundation-Emmerling Endowed Chair in Psychotic Disorders and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Bioengineering, and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh, is one of the foremost translational affective neuroscientists of her generation. Elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2024, recipient of the 2024 Society of Biological Psychiatry Gold Medal Award, the 2014 ACNP Joel Elkes Award for Outstanding Clinical Research, and the 2017 Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Colvin Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Mood Disorders Research, and the author of more than 400 peer-reviewed publications recognized by Clarivate Analytics as Highly Cited Research from 2018 to 2021, she has built a research program that deploys multimodal neuroimaging to map prefrontal-striatal-limbic circuitry abnormalities underlying bipolar disorder, with the overarching goal of converting circuit-level findings into objective biomarkers for earlier diagnosis, risk identification in youth, and targeted neuromodulation and metabolic interventions. In this Genomic Press Interview, Phillips traces a scientific trajectory shaped by intellectual independence and exceptional mentorship, from a pivotal zoology year at Cambridge that introduced her to the Aplysia neural network model, through psychiatry training at the Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry in London, to her emergence as a leader in biological psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh under the mentorship of David Kupfer. She discusses her foundational work demonstrating that abnormal face emotion processing and emotional reactivity serve as behaviorally measurable windows into prefrontal-limbic circuit dysfunction in bipolar disorder, her current work identifying neural circuit biomarkers of mania risk, and her translational agenda examining neurodevelopmental trajectories from infancy through young adulthood to detect risk dimensions before clinical threshold is reached. She also describes the three Phillips Centers she directs: CNCTI-P (Interventional Psychiatry), CENTRIM-BD (Metabolic Psychiatry), and CRTDAN (Translational and Developmental Neuroscience), which together instantiate a comprehensive precision psychiatry infrastructure at the University of Pittsburgh. Phillips has mentored more than 100 trainees across her career, including 15 NIH K awardees, and holds presidential or council roles in major international neuroscience societies. She reflects with candor on gender equity in academic neuroscience, as recognized by the 2023 ACNP Women's Advocacy Award and her inclusion in Research.com's Best Female Scientists in the World for 2023 and 2024, and on her vision for a precision psychiatry grounded in individual-level neural circuit data.