Formerly, Collins taught in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, and was the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology.
[7] After her PhD, she moved to a postdoctoral fellowship with Avrion Mitchison at University College London studying the locations of T cell receptor gene clusters, and next worked with Richard C. Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed retroviral vectors expressing cytokines and cytokine receptors.
She served as the head of UCL Immunology & Molecular Pathology from 2000 to 2007, became Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology in 2005, became Director of the UCL Division of Infection & Immunity in 2003, and served as the Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences between 2009 and 2014.
She stepped down as dean to become the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control.
[15] Collins married Tim Hunt in 1995,[1] who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, and knighted in 2006.