Jane Parker

Jane Elizabeth Parker (born 1960) is a British scientist who researches the immune responses of plants at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research.

Education and early life Jane Elizabeth Parker was born in 1960 in Great Britain and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Bradford in applied Biology in 1983. She went on to earn her PhD in 1986 from Swansea University on protein synthesis in Euglena.

Career and research Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. Throughout the 1990s, she worked at the Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre in the Norwich Research Park, at Norwich, England, but left in August 2001, with her husband, Dr. George Coupland to take up a post as an independent researcher at Cologne's Max Planck Institute.

In 2002, Parker was awarded a Sofia Kovalevskaya Award to continue her research into plant immune responses. She researches how plants defend themselves from disease-causing microorganisms. Her work involves isolating the genes which trigger innate defence mechanisms and combines genetics with molecular biology to evaluate how plants are able to avoid disease.

Since 2009, Parker has been an associate professor at the Institute of Genetics University of Cologne in Germany. and in 2023 she was elected an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is widely published and has been listed on the annual ISI Web of Knowledge most highly cited scientists for 2015, as published by Thomson Reuters.

Selected publications The following were noted as the five most important works by Parker, according to Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences, a German scientific research organisation group:

Awards and honours She is listed on Thomson Reuters' list of the annual ISI Web of Knowledge most highly cited scientists for 2015. She was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2016 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023.