Mary R. M. Bishai (born 1970) is an American physicist who is a Distinguished Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 2023, she was elected co-spokesperson of Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and was made responsible for the 1,400 person collaboration. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014.
Bishai was born to a family of engineers. Her father had a PhD in electrical engineering and her grandfather was a science teacher. She grew up in Nigeria and Egypt and is of Egyptian descent. In 1985, she read a National Geographic magazine about particle physics experiments taking place at CERN, and decided that was what she wanted to work on. She was an undergraduate student in physics at University of Colorado Boulder, then moved to Purdue University for graduate studies, where she worked on the CLEO experiment at Cornell University. She worked on parity violations in the decays of charm-strange baryons. She was awarded the Purdue University George W. Tautfest Award, an award that honors outstanding physics graduate students.
In 1998, Bishai joined Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as a research associate, where she was involved with Tevatron. She worked on quantum chromodynamics.
Bishai joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2004. She was hired to work on the MINOS experiment, a long baseline neutrino project. Her recommendations enabled the CD-0 decision from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) that enabled the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. She was part of the team who measured the J/psi meson cross sections at the Collider Detector at Fermilab. Her role as Project Scientist for the LBNE from 2012 to 2015 contributed to the formation of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in 2015.
Dr. Bishai also contributes as a mentor, committed to guiding young scientists in the field. This includes mentoring over 15 undergraduate students through the DOE-funded Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program and 5 high school student interns through the High School Research Program, both hosted by Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Additionally, she has mentored students who visited Brookhaven as part of the African School of Physics program.
In 2014, Bishai was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society âÂÂfor her contributions to flavour physics.âÂÂ
Bishai served as the co-spokesperson of Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) from January 2023 through March of 2025. As co-spokesperson, Bishai was responsible for leading the 1,400 member neutrino collaboration. DUNE will send the most intense neutrino beam in the world from Fermilab to the Sanford Underground Research Facility.