Rana Ellen Munns is an Australian botanist whose primary research has been to determine the traits that underpin salinity tolerance and adaptation to drought in crop plants. Rana was born in Sydney Australia and attended the University of Sydney, receiving her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry in 1966. She completed her Ph.D. in 1972 to begin a lifelong course of research on salt tolerance of plants first as a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and later at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra. In the early 1990s, she found that sodium exclusion was an important trait associated with the salt tolerance in wheat using a seedling stage assay. This work culminated in understanding wheat grain yield in saline soils in terms of genetic components that could be improved by an ancestral transporter gene. This research eventually led to a cultivar of wheat that yielded 25% more on saline soils that in farmers' fields and is used by over thirty wheat seed companies globally. Source: Wikipedia (en)