Profile of Mary Lou Guerinot

Abstract

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, Mary Lou Guerinot decided that she would major in biology in college in the hope of promoting environmental sustainability. As the 50th anniversary of Earth Day approaches, Guerinot, now a professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth College and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is well on her way toward achieving that goal through her work on the molecular mechanisms of metal ion uptake and its regulation. Guerinot’s work is laying the foundation for environmentally sustainable, nutrient-dense crops, as well as plant-based solutions for removal of toxic metals from soil. Her Inaugural Article (1) reports the identification of a transcription factor essential for plant growth under iron deficiency. The finding moves her team closer to understanding the iron homeostasis pathway in plants, holding promise for improving agricultural productivity and human health. Mary Lou Guerinot. Image courtesy of Olga Zhaxybayeva (Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH). Guerinot was raised in upstate New York, where she attended the Rochester-based Catholic all-girls St. Agnes High School. “Unlike the boys’ Catholic high school nearby, it was basically science-light,” she says. “We didn’t have physics or calculus, and very few students went on to college to study science.” She and a few other students urged their math teacher to let them study calculus on their own. The hard work on this subject and others paid off, and Guerinot was accepted at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She adhered to her decision to major in biology and earned a Bachelor of Science degree with distinction at Cornell in 1975. Four years later, Guerinot earned a doctorate in biology from Dalhousie University under the direction of David Patriquin, studying the sea urchin–lobster–kelp ecosystem. Envisioning life as a marine microbiologist, Guerinot did a postdoctoral fellowship at the …