Joanne Chory

Joanne Chory (March 19, 1955 – November 12, 2024) was an American plant biologist and geneticist. She was a professor and director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Chory was the founding director of the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI), a carbon dioxide removal approach to fight climate change by optimizing a plant’s natural ability to capture and store carbon dioxide and adapt to different climate conditions. Chory and the HPI team aim to help plants grow bigger and stronger root systems that can absorb larger amounts of carbon by burying it in the ground in the form of suberin, a naturally occurring substance. Chory and the HPI team received a $35 million award in support of the initiative from the TED Audacious Project in 2019 and another $30 million from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020.

Chory's work at the Salk Institute, which she joined in 1988, pioneered the use of molecular genetics to study how plants change their shape and size to optimize photosynthesis and growth for different environments. She held the Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman Chair in Plant Biology and was an adjunct professor in the Section of Cell and Developmental Biology at UC San Diego.

Chory was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 2011 and was the recipient of the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2019 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.