Jane Elizabeth Parker was born in 1960 in Great Britain[1] and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Bradford in applied Biology in 1983.
[3] 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.
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.
[7][8] 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:[9] She is listed on Thomson Reuters' list of the annual ISI Web of Knowledge most highly cited scientists for 2015.
[10] She was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2016[11] and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023.