Jane E. Parker facts for kids

Jane Elizabeth Parker (born in 1960) is a British scientist. She studies how plants protect themselves from diseases at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany.

Early Life and Education

Jane Elizabeth Parker was born in Great Britain in 1960. She went to the University of Bradford and earned her first degree in Biology in 1983. Later, she completed her PhD in 1986 at Swansea University. Her PhD research focused on how Euglena makes proteins.

Career and Plant Research

After finishing her PhD, Dr. Parker worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. In the 1990s, she worked at the Sainsbury Laboratory in England. In 2001, she moved to Cologne, Germany, to become an independent researcher at the Max Planck Institute.

In 2002, Dr. Parker received the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award. This award helped her continue her important research into how plants fight off diseases. She studies how plants defend themselves from tiny living things called microorganisms that can make them sick.

Her work involves finding the specific genes that start a plant's natural defense system. She uses both genetics and molecular biology to understand how plants avoid getting sick. Dr. Parker's research has shown that plants have many ways to defend themselves. She found that a protein called EDS1 is a key part of this defense. EDS1 works with other proteins to create special groups. These groups then start the plant's immune response. The way a plant fights disease can change depending on which other proteins EDS1 combines with. For example, it might combine with PAD4 or SAG101 to begin the defense.

Since 2009, Dr. Parker has also been a professor at the Institute of Genetics University of Cologne in Germany. In 2013, she became a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. She has written many scientific papers. In 2015, she was named one of the most highly cited scientists by Thomson Reuters. This means her work is often used and referred to by other scientists.

Awards and Recognition

Dr. Jane Parker has received several important awards and honors for her scientific work:

• In 2015, she was listed among the most highly cited scientists by Thomson Reuters.
• In 2016, she was chosen as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.
• In 2023, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is a very high honor for scientists in the United Kingdom.

See also

In Spanish: Jane E. Parker para niños