Mary-Lou Pardue was an American geneticist who was a professor emerita in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which she originally joined in 1972.
14 Facts About Mary-Lou Pardue
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Mary-Lou Pardue's research focused on the role of telomeres in chromosome replication, particularly in Drosophila.
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Mary-Lou Pardue received a bachelor's degree in biology in 1955 from the College of William and Mary.
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Mary-Lou Pardue received a master's degree in radiation biology in 1959 from the University of Tennessee, where she had been eligible for a Ph.
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Mary-Lou Pardue subsequently worked for several years as a research technician at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before returning to graduate school in 1965 at Yale University, from which she received a Ph.
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Mary-Lou Pardue worked under the supervision of Joseph Gall, whose support of women in his research laboratory was considered highly unusual at the time.
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Mary-Lou Pardue then became a postdoctoral fellow with Max Birnstiel at the University of Edinburgh.
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Mary-Lou Pardue became a full professor in the department in 1980.
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In 1995, Mary-Lou Pardue became the first Boris Magasanik Professor of Biology.
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Mary-Lou Pardue was among the women faculty who organized with fellow MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins in the mid-1990s to bring complaints of institutional discrimination against women faculty to then-President Charles Vest.
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In 1994, Mary-Lou Pardue was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT.
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Mary-Lou Pardue became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1978, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985.
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Mary-Lou Pardue's work is believed to be evolutionarily related to telomerase-generated telomeres, which highlights the theory that parasitic transposable elements could have possibly evolved from mechanisms in the cell that exist to maintain chromosomal health.
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Mary-Lou Pardue found that hybridization reactions with radioactive DNA were able to discriminate between different types of DNA.