Mary Gehring

Mary Gehring is a 2021 & 2023 principal investigator within the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is a professor of biology and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Her research primarily focuses on the genetics and epigenetics of seed biology in plants. In 2023, her team, led by Matt Shoulders, won the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge grant for the project, 'Enhanced photosynthesis in crops' (EPiC). In 2021, she received a seed grant for her research, 'A new approach to enhance genetic diversity to improve crop breeding'.

Mary took a PhD in plant biology from the University of California, Berkeley and performed postdoctoral research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre. In 2023, she was appointed the first incumbent of the Whitehead Institute's David Baltimore Chair in Biomedical Research. She is a previous recipient of the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award (2013) and an NSF CAREER Award (2014).