Mary-Lou Pardue, one of the nation’s outstanding scientists, received the BA in biology from the College of William and Mary in 1955, the master’s of science in radiation biology at UT in 1959, and the PhD in biology from Yale in 1970. She joined the MIT faculty in 1972 as an associate professor and was promoted to professor in 1980. In 1995 she was named the first Magasanik Professor of Biology at MIT, a professorship named for Boris Magasanik, Jacques Monod Professor of Microbiology at MIT. Pardue’s two major fields of research are cellular and molecular biology. She specializes in studies in chromosome structure and the mechanisms by which genes carry out functions and affect development of higher organizations.
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. From 1991 to 1994, she chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ Section on Genetics, and she has been a NAS council member since 1995. She was president of the American Society of Cell Biology (1985–86) and the Genetics Society of America (1982–83). In 1977 she received the Esther Langer Award for Cancer Research. She is a member of the UT Alumni Academic Hall of Fame.