Meredith Grey is an attending general surgeon at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. She is the daughter of the now-deceased Ellis Grey, a famed general surgeon, and Thatcher Grey. She is married to Derek and they have a daughter, Zola Grey Shepherd and a son, Derek Bailey Shepherd.

She is intelligent, compassionate, hard-working, has good medical instincts, and a natural flair for medicine. Other than that, Meredith is also easily distracted and indecisive, and oftentimes outspoken.

And unlike Derek, who saw everything in distinct shades of black and white, Meredith tends sees things in shades of gray, which Carolyn Shepherd remarked to her son that was what he needed, while she was visiting Seattle in Sympathy for the Devil. However, this difference in viewpoints have culminated in what could be a breach in their marriage, at the finale of season 7, Unaccompanied Minor, where she messed up Derek's Alzheimer drug trial. She secretly accessed the pharmacy, where the trial drugs were stored, and subsequently swapped the placebo for the actual drug, for Patient #122, aka Adele. And when busted by a drunk Alex, who had seen her behaving suspiciously, she much later confided in Cristina that she felt that her actions were justified, as Adele was Richard's wife, and she should do something since Adele was about to have saline injected into her brain, and the trial drug sample could help her from becoming a 'vorked out lump', in her own words.The couple subsequently got into an argument in the changing room, where Derek argued that it was Alzheimer's, a disease that she could potentially have, and one whose progression he was trying to stop or cure, while at the same time espousing that everything was black and white, a right and a wrong. Meredith responded that the situation was much more complicated than that, as it was Richard and Adele.

After attending medical school, Meredith secured a spot at Seattle Grace Hospital as a surgical intern and moved from Boston to her mother's house in Seattle. She attended Dartmouth College.

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The season nine promotional photograph of Ellen Pompeo

Because of her mother's reputation, Meredith was often treated differently from other doctors, sometimes favored and sometimes disliked. Meredith showed promise as an intern, she made a difficult diagnosis on her first day and during the rest of her internship, she assisted in several advanced procedures, particularly neurosurgical cases.

After correctly diagnosing a patient with a brain tumor, she approached Derek Shepherd with the idea of a clinical trial. On their thirteenth patient, they had a success and the clinical trial was published in a medical journal and named The Shepherd Method. But she was not too pleased, to find that she was not mentioned in the article and was somewhat upset to hear from Derek that he was the one taking the risk, despite her doing all the work.

Soon after, Meredith discovered numerous journals belonging to her mother, while she learned more about her and also picked up some surgical skills and even a doll from her past, Anatomy Jane, which helped her save a young girl.

On her wedding day, she was given a colon removal operation, from Derek, as her first solo surgery, as a wedding present. Without any intervention from other doctors, she successfully completed the surgery, despite Richard and Mark observing in the background. Richard Webber informed her that her mother would have been proud, while Meredith said that her mother was likely to have been glad that she didn't kill anyone instead.

She later also performed a solo neurological surgery by herself, as Derek, the attending doctor, was occupied with another patient in another OR. When Derek was setting up the Alzheimer's trial, Meredith was there to assist him. But she was not entirely pleased to find out that he chose Alex, over her, to help him. It was only later, that Alex explained that Meredith was more suited to be his assistant, as she had personal experience, in dealing with the patients and family. But when she tampered with the sample that Adele was supposed to get, Alex suspected that something was amiss. That culminated in him outing her, while he was drunk, and she being suspended, before being fired by the board. Richard took the fall for her, but she and Derek agreed that they shouldn't be close at work too, so Meredith decided to leave neurosurgery.

Electing general surgery as her specialty, Meredith passed the boards and is now an attending general surgeon at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.