Joanne Chory

Joanne Chory was an American plant biologist and geneticist born March 19, 1955, in Boston, Massachusetts, and died November 12, 2024, who worked at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Her research described how light regulates seedling development in the plant Arabidopsis, identified steroid hormone control of plant growth, and elucidated retrograde signaling pathways by which the chloroplast communicates with the cell nucleus, and she founded the Harnessing Plants Initiative, which secured about sixty five million dollars to develop crop plants that store more carbon in their roots as a strategy against climate change. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 and as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 2011, and received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2018, the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2018, the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research in 2019, and the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and the Benjamin Franklin Medal, both in 2024.