Joanne chory Ph.D.

Scientific Advisory Board Member

Joanne Chory is leading the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI), an innovative, scalable and bold approach to fight climate change by optimizing a plant’s natural ability to capture and store carbon and adapt to diverse climate conditions. Chory and the HPI team aim to help plants grow bigger, more robust root systems that can absorb larger amounts of carbon by burying it in the ground in the form of suberin, a naturally occurring carbon-rich substance. The Salk team will use cutting-edge genetic and genomic techniques to develop these Salk Ideal Plants.™

Chory has spent more than 30 years using Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering mustard plant, as a model for plant growth. She has pioneered the use of molecular genetics to study how plants alter their size, shape and form to optimize growth and photosynthesis for particular environments. Utilizing plant genetics coupled with biochemical studies has allowed her to determine one of the most complex signaling networks that controls growth and development in response to environmental change.