Caroline Dean

Dame Caroline Dean is a British plant scientist, born in 1957, who works at the John Innes Centre and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her research explains the molecular controls that let plants judge seasonal timing for flowering, particularly vernalization, the process by which a prolonged period of cold accelerates flowering in spring, and she has traced this to gene regulation and epigenetic, chromatin-based silencing of the Flowering Locus C gene that lets a plant remember it has been through winter. She was instrumental in establishing the small mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana as a standard model organism in plant science.