Dean has made outstanding contributions in the study of developmental timing in plants. Her work has revealed the mechanism by which plants remember they have experienced winter, demonstrated novel RNA processing mechanisms controlling flowering and determined the molecular basis of natural variation in Arabidopsis flowering time. Her discoveries have broad significance in the fields of epigenetics, post-transcriptional regulation and molecular evolution. Dean has also made a massive contribution to the development of Arabidopsis as a model, establishing resources for genetic mapping and insertional mutagenesis, and providing physical maps that underpinned the sequencing of the genome. ” She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to plant science research and women in science. Dean was awarded with the Darwin Medal 2016 by the Royal Society, citing:

Our recent work has focused on a mechanistic understanding of vernalization and on the pathways that determine a requirement for vernalization. These pathways converge on a gene that encodes a floral repressor called FLC. We analyse how these pathways intersect during development, in different environmental conditions, and through microevolution.