The John Innes Centre is pleased to announce that one of its senior scientists, Professor Caroline Dean, has received two prestigious honours in the last two weeks. Two weeks ago Professor Dean was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and has now been awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.

“We are delighted that Caroline’s pioneering research and the major contribution she has made to UK plant science has been recognised, almost simultaneously, by these two prestigious awards”, said Professor Chris Lamb (Director of the John Innes Centre).

Professor Dean was awarded her OBE “for services to plant science”, while the citation (3) for Caroline’s Royal Society Fellowship refers to the “outstanding contributions she has made in the study of developmental timing in plants”.

BACKGROUND

1) The John Innes Centre (JIC), Norwich, UK is an independent, world-leading research centre in plant and microbial sciences. The JIC has over 850 staff and students. JIC carries out high quality fundamental, strategic and applied research to understand how plants and microbes work at the molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The JIC also trains scientists and students, collaborates with many other research laboratories and communicates its science to end-users and the general public. The JIC is grant-aided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

2) Professor Caroline Dean is an Associate Research Director at the JIC. Her research has focused on understanding the molecular controls used by plants to judge when to flower, particularly in response to seasonal changes in temperature. Her group has also made significant contributions to developing Arabidopsis or ‘thalecress’ as the model plant for genetic and molecular investigations. http://www.jic.ac.uk/staff/caroline-dean/index.htm

Caroline Dean received her undergraduate and graduate education at the University of York. She then spent five years in California undertaking post-doctoral research at Advanced Genetic Sciences Inc. She returned to the UK, taking up a position as project leader at the John Innes Centre in September 1988. Caroline was born in 1957 and is married with two children, aged 12 and 10.

3) Royal Society citation:
“Dean has made outstanding contributions in the study of developmental timing in plants. Her work has revealed the mechanism by which plants remember they have experienced winter, demonstrated novel RNA processing mechanisms controlling flowering and determined the molecular basis of natural variation in Arabidopsis flowering time. Her discoveries have broad significance in the fields of epigenetics, post-transcriptional regulation and molecular evolution. Dean has also made a massive contribution to the development of Arabidopsis as a model, establishing resources for genetic mapping and insertional mutagenesis, and providing physical maps that underpinned the sequencing of the genome.”