Mary-Lou Pardue
| Mary-Lou Pardue | |
|---|---|
| Fields | Genetics, cell biology |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | (1970) |
| Doctoral advisor | Joseph Gall |
| Known for | Study of Drosophila telomeres |
Mary-Lou Pardue is an American geneticist who is an emeritus professor in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which she originally joined in 1972. Her research focused on the role of telomeres in chromosome replication, particularly in Drosophila (fruit flies).
Pardue received a bachelor's degree in biology in 1955 from the College of William and Mary. She received a master's degree in radiation biology in 1959 from the University of Tennessee, where she had been eligible for a Ph.D. but convinced the department to give her the master's degree instead, later explaining in an interview that "in the society I was in it was quite all right for a wife to be going to school, but getting a Ph.D. was a little too serious". She subsequently worked for several years as a research technician before returning to graduate school at Yale University, from which she received a Ph.D. in biology in 1970. She worked under the supervision of Joseph Gall, whose support of women in his research laboratory was considered highly unusual at the time. Pardue then became a postdoctoral fellow with Max Birnstiel at the University of Edinburgh.
As Pardue later described the process, her search for a faculty position in the early 1970s coincided with broad interest in United States academic institutions in hiring women, and she was surprised to be heavily recruited. After initially being rejected by MIT, she was subsequently offered an associate professor position there and accepted it in part because other offers were for more junior assistant professor positions, and in part because the department already had other women faculty. She became a full professor in the department in 1980. In 1995, Pardue became the first Boris Magasanik Professor of Biology. 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 to then-dean Charles Vest.
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