Mary Lou Guerinot

Mary Lou Guerinot is a molecular geneticist recognized for her work on iron homeostasis in plants. She studies how plants remove metals from soil—work that is creating solutions to malnutrition and to the problem of toxic metals such as arsenic in the food chain. Guerinot helped identify the protein responsible for iron uptake from soil and was among the first plant biologists to use synchrotron X-ray fluorescence microprobe imaging to study the distribution of trace elements such as iron, zinc, and manganese in plants. She also helped develop the field of ionomics, which uses genomics and bioinformatics to study the functional connections in organisms between genes, proteins, and minerals and identify genes controlling the mineral composition of food crops. Genes that she has discovered have been used to improve the iron content of crops like cassava and rice and wheat. 

Guerinot is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has served on its governance council since 2023. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society of Plant Biologists and a nonresident fellow at the Salk Institute.

At Dartmouth, she rose through the ranks to full professor, and is the Ronald and Deborah Harris Professor in the Sciences. She is a past President of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and ASPB. She is a recipient of the Dartmouth Graduate Mentoring Award, the Dean of Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentoring and Advising, and the Dennis R. Hoagland Award from ASPB. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Guerinot earned her bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and her Ph.D. from Dalhousie University, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of Maryland and at the DOE-MSU Plant Research Laboratory.