Education

PhD, University of Greenwich at Medway, Kent, United Kingdom

M.S., Agricultural Biotechnology, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore,India

B.S., Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India

Current Research Areas

New member. Interest and/or experience in: Genomic technologies applicable to plant breeding, genome-wide association studies, gene identification, expression studies, VIGS, and gene editing.

Publications/Conference Papers

Honors/Awards

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), for Visiting Scientist (International competition award);  

Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) scholarship for PhD at England.

Brief Biography

I am from an agriculture-oriented family in Bangalore, India and was raised around all farm activities (seed and crop selection, soil preparation for crop cultivation, crop irrigation, weed management, labor management, crop protection and harvesting, and marketing of crop produce). I was admitted for study in Computer Science and Dental Sciences but preferred to enroll in the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore, to study agriculture. With practical experiences in farms and education at UAS Bangalore, I wanted to apply the knowledge of recombinant DNA technology and molecular biology to crop plants and thus, joined Agriculture Biotechnology. With good lab practices and skilled in molecular techniques, I was selected for the PhD program at the University of Greenwich, UK, to study the molecular biodiversity of begomoviruses and whitefly in relation to begomoviral disease epidemic outbreaks in India. I continued my postdoctoral work on begomoviruses across Africa and then moved to work on potyvirus-soybean molecular interactions (Department of Agriculture, Canada and later at Iowa State University, Ames-IA). More recently, I have joined the soybean breeding program due to my interest in improving resistance to soybean diseases/pests. I always love to read or know the latest innovations in agriculture and to try to understand how my research can relate to it and could help farmers. I enjoy cooking with my own recipes (fusion type food) and playing cricket.