Deborah P. Delmer

Deborah Pierson Delmer is an American plant pathologist, and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. She was one of the first scientists to discover the enzymes and biochemical mechanisms for tryptophan synthesis.

Delmer became president of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) as of 1999. She was awarded the 2011 ASPB Leadership in Science Public Service Award and the 2003 Anselme Payen Award.

Career Delmer earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry with departmental honors at Indiana University Bloomington in 1963. Later, she attended the University of California, San Diego, where she identified the pathway of tryptophan biosynthesis in plants, an area others had not studied, Using a combination of approaches from molecular biology and genetics, Delmer and her collaborators developed a cDNA library and were the first to identify a plant gene involved in the synthesis of cellulose. She served as the editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of Plant Biology from 2002–2004.