Mary Mallory exemplifies the best of compassionate, hardworking nurses dedicated to the well-being of their young patients.

In honor of her efforts, the Nurse Practitioner in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease who cares for children infected with or exposed to HIV received the highest honor of her career last fall. UT Southwestern annually presents awards recognizing the contributions of its nearly 1,000 Advanced Practice Providers (APPs), and Ms. Mallory was selected as the Outstanding APP in Clinical Practice.

Ms. Mallory began her career with UTSW in 1986 as part of a research position studying babies with low birth weights. When the project ended, she worked for 11 months at Bryan’s House, a nonprofit that cares for children with special needs, including those who were infected with HIV at a time when the disease was widely feared.

In 1989, she returned to UT Southwestern on a Ryan White grant, which provides federal funding for HIV services, and she has continued to serve that population ever since.

“In the beginning, working with this population was considered risky, but I never felt that. They were just people who needed care, and I wanted to help them,” says Ms. Mallory.

Today, she says her job has changed in a wonderful way. “The percentage of babies who acquire HIV from their infected mothers is only about 1%-2% nowadays. When I started, it was about 20%. Now all pregnant women get tested, and if they are positive, mothers are started on HIV therapy and their babies are treated prophylactically.

“Sometimes we see an HIV-positive mother whom we cared for as an infant, and she is able to give birth to an HIV-exposed baby who does not become infected,” Ms. Mallory says.

Over the years, her job has had other challenges. When she first began working with HIV-exposed and HIV-infected children, she was an anomaly, a UTSW employee who worked at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. Due to that unusual situation, no dedicated office space was available. So Ms. Mallory got creative and set up a makeshift office in an orthopedic casting room.

In addition to assisting the pediatric HIV-exposed population, Ms. Mallory works in the International Adoption Medicine Clinic at Children’s Health.

In her leisure time, Ms. Mallory is a diehard football fan. The two teams she follows are Baylor, where her daughter, Grace, attended college, and the Longview Lobos, her high school team. “They’re always in the state playoffs,” she says.