[1] Chory was the founding director of the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI),[2] a carbon dioxide removal approach to fight climate change by optimizing a plant’s natural ability to capture and store carbon dioxide and adapt to different climate conditions.

Chory and the HPI team aim to help plants grow bigger and stronger root systems that can absorb larger amounts of carbon by burying it in the ground in the form of suberin, a naturally occurring substance.

[5][6] Chory's work at the Salk Institute, which she joined in 1988, pioneered the use of molecular genetics to study how plants change their shape and size to optimize photosynthesis and growth for different environments.

[9] Chory was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 2011 and was the recipient of the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2019 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.

She approached this information from various directions including using genetics, genomics, cell biology, x-ray crystallography, biochemistry, and ecology.

She participated in research dissecting this complex process by isolating mutations that alter light-regulated seedling development in Arabidopsis.

[16][17] Her work identified mutants that are deficient in the phytochrome photoreceptors and in nuclear-localized repressors and also revealed that steroid hormones control light-regulated seedling development.