Legendary country musician Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80 after “a brief battle with cancer”, her representatives said in a statement on Tuesday.

Parton, who was born into a poor farming family in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, in 1946, became a singer and performer during her early childhood, and earned ten competitive Grammy Awards during her career.

But she also left a mark on science, public health and education. She donated to medical centres, vaccine research and disaster relief. One of the most famous animals in science was named after her: Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

Scientists around the world paid tribute to Parton following the news of her death.

“Dolly provided the soundtrack for my PhD, and is gratefully acknowledged in my thesis as a key contributor! She was the very best of us: we should all strive to be more like Dolly (rhinestones and all),” Catherine Heymans, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, UK, told Nature by e-mail.

“Today is a sad day as we mourn an exceptional artist, a true champion of kindness, and ambassador of science and public health,” wrote Tedros Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, on the social-media platform X.

Others reflected on how Parton wielded her fame for good. “Few celebrities use their influence to support science so meaningfully,” wrote Gaurav Kansagara, a cell biologist at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, on Bluesky, another social-media site.

Here are five ways that Dolly Parton contributed to science.

Research funder

One of Parton’s longest-lasting influences on science is her part in creating one of the major vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In March 2020, Parton gave US$1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), in Nashville, Tennessee, which created the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund.

According to Mark Denison, a Vanderbilt paediatrician and infectious-disease researcher, the money helped to fund the “critical” early stages of research into a then-experimental mRNA vaccine eventually produced by Moderna, a biotechnology firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The fund is acknowledged in the first published report of a phase I trial of the vaccine, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2020¹.

At least 37 research papers credit the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund with support, according to a Nature analysis of the Dimensions database (part of Digital Science, a firm operated by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which has a share in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature).

Music is not a universal language — but it can bring us together when words fail

Encouraging vaccinations

Parton’s advocacy for COVID-19 vaccines didn’t stop at funding research. In March 2021, Parton was filmed while receiving a dose at the VUMC, encouraging others to do the same.

“I’m old enough to get it, and I’m smart enough to get it”, quipped Parton, before reworking her hit song ‘Jolene’ to include the words, “vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate”.

Neil Stone, a clinician and infectious-disease researcher at University College London, reposted the video on X after her death, calling Parton a “legend”. “She was a great philanthropist, donating a million dollars to Covid vaccine research which went on to save many lives,” he wrote.

Parton getting immunized publicly provided “a ‘shot of hope’, reassuring many that getting the vaccine was best for them and their families”, says William Schaffner, a researcher in preventive medicine at the VUMC. “Dolly Parton created a connection between public health and the average person.”

Public health

Parton’s philanthropy extended to a wealth of causes. In 1994, she contributed a version of the song ‘You Gotta Be My Baby’ to the charity album Red Hot + Country, which was produced to raise money to fight HIV/AIDS.

In her home county of Sevier, Tennessee, she raised $500,000 at a benefit concert for LeConte Medical Center, which opened in 2010 with a dedicated Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services. She also donated $1 million to paediatric infectious-disease research at Vanderbilt, and this February, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville was renamed Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital after an undisclosed “generational” gift, funding a new paediatric residency programme, rural telehealth and specialist recruitment.

“Dolly Parton *chose* not to be a billionaire,” wrote Carlie Trott, a social psychologist at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, on Bluesky. “She never forgot what it means to be in need.”

Dolly the muse

The country singer — who held an honorary doctorate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — became an inspiration across the research world.