Caroline Dean studies the mechanism of seasonal timing in plants. Her work focuses on how flowering is accelerated by long periods of cold and how these mechanisms have changed during adaptation to changed climates. She showed that a conserved chromatin switching mechanism is required for silencing expression of a floral repressor gene in response to low temperatures.

Dean studied biology at the University of York (UK), where she received her PhD degree in 1982. From 1983, she researched at Advanced Genetic Sciences in Oakland (USA). Since 1988 she works as project leader at the John Innes Centre in Norwich (UK). The Leopoldina elected Caroline Dean into the section Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in 2008.

Since 1998, the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award is awarded annually to female scientists world-wide. The award is endowed with 100,000 Euro each. Caroline Dean is the fifth member of the Leopoldina to receive this honour.