Mary J Marret is a paediatrician with a special interest in community paediatrics. She has been practising as a paediatrician for about thirty years after undergraduate and postgraduate training at the National University of Singapore. She is a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur with a parallel clinical appointment as senior consultant paediatrician at the University of Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC).

She has extensive experience in undergraduate and postgraduate training with active involvement in the development and implementation of the undergraduate and postgraduate paediatric curriculum at the Faculty of Medicine. Currently, she is the Paediatric Assessment Coordinator for undergraduate students in the University of Malaya Medical Programme (UMMP). As Faculty Advisor for clinical assessment, she helped to design the examination format for the UMMP Final Barrier Clinical Assessment, introduced innovations to run examinations through the Covid-19 pandemic, and continues to advise on further refinements post-pandemic. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, UK, and has been examiner for membership examinations conducted by the RCPCH for over a decade.

In her roles as Chairman of the Child Protection Committee at the UM Medical Centre as well as Chair of the Child Protection Sub-committee of the Malaysian Paediatric Association, she has an interest in enhancing professional capacity and competence of professionals in the field of child protection within the institution as well as in the country. She provides consultation to a multidisciplinary team that performs assessments of children referred for suspected child maltreatment and conducts in-house training for doctors, nurses and social workers involved in this multi-disciplinary care. She has been invited by various organisations to provide education on child protection and to advise on laws, polices and service provision, including other local hospitals, educational institutions, government agencies, NGOs and various professional bodies. She is a member of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect and was part of the scientific committee for the 10th ISPCAN Asia Pacific Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect held in Kuala Lumpur. She was a member of an international committee of experts under the auspices of the World Health Organisation which developed guidelines for the health sector response to child maltreatment.

Together with a fellow paediatrician, she pioneered the establishment of a paediatric developmental clinic at UMMC in the late 1990s, collaborating with the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine to address unmet needs of children with disabilities and developmental problems. This paved the way for junior colleagues to pursue training in developmental paediatrics, with the subsequent establishment of a Child Development Centre at UMMC.

Her research interests are in child victimization across a variety of settings with publications in scientific journals and book chapters and presentations at local and international conferences. She has also been a reviewer for medical journals. She has collaborated in population-based research regarding the epidemiology of child maltreatment in Malaysia as well as the exposure of Malaysian adolescents to risks and victimization through their engagement with online digital technology. Her recent publications on abusive head trauma have examined adverse outcomes of mortality, disability and developmental problems as well as financial implications such as the cost of inpatient care.

On behalf of the Malaysian Paediatric Association, she has written articles providing advice on child health which have been published in a local parenting magazine as well the local media. She utilises creative writing and music as channels to reflect on insights derived from her interaction with children.