Caroline Dean is a plant biologist based at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. She helped to establish Arabidopsis as a model plant organism, and has worked for many years on the epigenetic mechanisms that regulate vernalisation, the process by which plants accelerate their flowering after periods of prolonged cold. We met Caroline at the recent Spring Meeting of the British Society for Developmental Biology. We asked her about her career, her thoughts on the plant field and being awarded

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... s year's FEBS EMBO Women in Science Award. We are here at the Spring Meeting of the British Society for Developmental Biology. How are you finding the meeting? This is not a meeting that I come to very often, but the questions asked here are always interesting because people think about my topic in a slightly different way. It's always very interesting and illuminating to see what grabs people's attention and what they get confused about. This year you were awarded the FEBS EMBO Women in Science Award. What does receiving this prize mean to you, and what advice do you have for young female scientists?