Professor Christina Mitchell trained as a physician scientist specialising in clinical haematology. She received a degree in Medicine from Melbourne University and consultant training in Haematology at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne. She graduated with a Fellowship from the Royal Australian College of Physicians and also a Fellowship in Pathology. She obtained a PhD from Monash University and her post-doctoral studies were undertaken in the field of intracellular signalling at Washington University Medical School, St Louis, USA. In 1991 she returned to Australia and became an independent investigator at the Department of Medicine, Box Hill Hospital. In 1999 she was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, while also conducting research on the newly emerging family of enzymes, inositol polyphosphate 5-phosphatases, negative regulators of PI3-kinase signalling. In 2006 Prof. Mitchell became Head of the School of Biomedical Sciences at Monash University, which is the largest School within the Faculty of Medicine. In 2011 she became the Dean of Medicine at Monash University. She currently holds a position of Academic Vice-President and Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University.

The major research direction of her group is to characterise the metabolic pathways that regulate phosphoinositide signalling in human cancer. Her group was among the first to purify and clone the 5-phosphatases and to delineate the substrates for these important enzymes in cancer. More recently her group has investigated the functional role of inositol polyphosphate 3- and 4-phosphatases in various cell systems and human disease. Prof Mitchell has published her work in the prestigious scientific journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, The Journal of Cell Biology, Blood, Cancer Research, Human Molecular Genetics, Oncogene, Cancer Cell and many others.

She has presented the group's work at many national meetings and as an invited symposium and/or plenary speaker at international meetings, including Keystone meeting, 'Lipid signalling molecules', USA, 2002; Japanese Lipid Signalling meeting, 2004; Biochemical Society Annual Symposium, "The Cell Biology of Inositol Lipids and Phosphates", Birmingham, UK, 2006; FEBS advanced course in Lipid Signalling Pathways in Italy, 2007. In 2012 she was one of three organisers of a conference on Inositide signaling hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences, New York, USA. She was also invited (fully funded) to speak at the '22nd IUBMB and 37th FEBS Conference', held in Seville, Spain in 2012. In 2013 Prof. Mitchell was invited to speak at the International conference in The Netherlands 'FHL1 related myopathies: towards an FHL1 related myopathy consortium' and in 2014 she was invited to speak at the international conference '39th Symposium on Hormone and Cell Regulation' in France. Prof Mitchell was an invited speaker at eight conferences in 2015, both national and international, most notably as the Distinguished Speaker at Beatson Institute in Glasgow, UK and at "Signalling 2015: Cellular Functions of Phosphoinositides and Inositol Phosphates" in Cambridge, UK. In addition, she has been invited to speak at "Pseudoenzymes 2016" in Liverpool, UK in 2016 and at Keystone Symposia "PI3K Pathways in Immunology, Growth Disorders and Cancer" in Santa Fe, USA in 2017.