Adaptation and Resilience in Plants: 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science presented to Joanne Chory, Ph.D

Joanne Chory is the recipient of the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science for her exceptional research on elucidating the signal transduction pathways of the plant light response, and for inspiring new strategies to engineer plants for the fight against climate change. Chory received her Ph.D. in microbiology studying a phototroph, where the power of the genetic approach in bacteria impressed her. For her postdoctoral work, she turned her attention to plant sciences, and launched a genetic screen to dissect the response of the model organism plant Arabidopsis to light. The mutants that illuminated her path had a surprising response in that she isolated dark grown mutant plants that looked as if they were growing in light. The implications were tantalizing: the data suggested that the plant light response pathway was always active, but was normally repressed in the dark. She launched her independent career at The Salk Institute, where she dissected many signaling pathways, with discoveries including that signals from the light harvesting organelles chloroplasts interplay with signals from the nucleus, that plants use steroid hormone pathways to grow and thrive—a process previously thought limited to animals and delineating how plants adapt to shade. More recently as founding director of The Harvesting Plants Initiative at The Salk Institute, she has turned from studying how plants adapt to varying conditions of light and shade, to asking how plants can be engineered to combat climate change. She is a mentor and inspiring colleague to many, and her efforts to combat climate change have encouraged many other plant scientists to develop innovative approaches to this important challenge. For these many vital contributions, Joanne Chory is recognized as a pivotal leader in the study of plant light signaling and inspiring the development of solutions to climate change with the awarding of the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science.