Mary-Lou Pardue (September 15, 1933 – June 1, 2024) was an American geneticist who was a professor emerita in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which she originally joined in 1972.
[2]: 98 She subsequently worked for several years as a research technician at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before returning to graduate school in 1965 at Yale University, from which she received a Ph.D. in biology in 1970.
[5] She worked under the supervision of Joseph Gall, whose support of women in his research laboratory was considered highly unusual at the time.
[2] 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.
[1] Her work is believed to be evolutionarily related to telomerase-generated telomeres, which highlights the theory that parasitic transposable elements could have possibly evolved from mechanisms in the cell that exist to maintain chromosomal health.