Christine Mummery received an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Nottingham, UK, followed by a PhD in Biophysics from Guy's Hospital Medical School, University of London, UK, on the topic "Ultrasound in Wound Healing". She then moved to the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands, a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, affiliated with the University Medical Center Utrecht and Utrecht University, where researchers specialize in the field of developmental biology and stem cells. Here she undertook postdoctoral studies, examining the differentiation of neuroblastoma cells and regulation of the cell cycle. In 1981, in collaboration with Chris Graham, John Heath, and Martin Pera in Oxford, she introduced mouse embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells into the laboratory, followed in 1984 by human EC cells. As a tenured staff scientist at the Hubrecht Institute in 1985, she worked with Colin Stewart at EMBL in Heidelberg to derive mouse ESCs and bring them to the Hubrecht laboratory, and in 2000 collaborated again with Martin Pera and Alan Trounson in Australia to introduce their newly derived hESCs to the Netherlands. She earned an appointment as an Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of the Netherlands (ICIN) Professor of Developmental Biology at the University of Utrecht Medical Centre, and her lab began focusing on cardiomyocyte and vascular differentiation of hESCs.