Helen Donis-Keller was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. As a child, she loved art, so she pursued a degree in graphic design and photography at The University of Cincinnati. She spent two work sections at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Missouri, designing stationery and gift wrap. In 1970 Donis-Keller and her then-husband moved to Canada where they stayed for five years for her husband to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War. She got a job as a graphic designer at Lakehead University and started taking college classes, including chemistry and biology, for fun. She became captivated by science and quit her job to become a technician doing histology. Donis-Keller soon realized that if she wanted to work on her own projects, she needed to have a Ph.D. to do so. She applied to several programs and selected Harvard University after interviewing with Mark Ptashne and Walter “Wally” Gilbert. At Harvard, Donis-Keller worked in Gilbert’s lab on the RNA sequencing method using an enzyme approach. Upon graduation, she briefly worked with Bernard N. Fields on reovirus before accepting an offer at Wally’s new company, Biogen, Inc. As the company started to grow, they made a lot of proposals. Two of Biogen’s projects were interferon and human serum albumin. After a couple of years at Biogen, Donis-Keller thought she needed a break. She was encouraged to join Collaborative Research, which she did. There she worked on project development, including developing markers and creating a human linkage map. By 1985, they had started collaborating with Lap-Chee Tsui and Ray White, who both had cystic fibrosis families. In August 1985, they discovered a LOD score of 3.22—very high—on one marker. They continued to develop more markers and hired Philip Palmer Green to develop the algorithms they needed. Donis-Keller started working on a paper that they submitted to Cell in August 1987. However, after the results came out and the fanfare died down, the project was canceled. She accepted a job at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she continued to work on genetic mapping. During a sabbatical, she took some art classes and decided when the sabbatical was over, she wanted to get a master’s in fine arts. She closed down her lab and came back to Boston, Massachusetts, to move in with her new husband, Boris Magasanik, and attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. After graduation, Donis-Keller joined the faculty of Olin College of Engineering as a professor of biology and art. She talks about her artwork, including photography of Iceland and Death Valley, her teaching, and the importance of acknowledging women in science.