Pradeep Sharma
Dr. Pradeep Sharma received his Ph.D. in 2002 on the cloning and characterization of cotton leaf curl viruses. He performed his postdoctoral research (2006 2008) at Tohoku University, Japan with Prof M Ikegami as a JSPS fellow, where he worked on RNA silencing. He also undertook postdoctoral work at the ARO Volcani Center, Israel with Prof Y Gafni (2006 2006), focusing on the nuclear import of genes using yeast one hybrid system, as a DST scientist (2006), as a visiting scientist at South Dakota State University (2011) investigating allele mining and comparative genomics in rice, and at Oklahoma State University (2016) on small noncoding RNAs. In 2008, Dr. Sharma joined the faculty in the Department of Crop Improvement at ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research, Karnal, where he is the Principal Scientist. He directs a research group studying the role of sRNAs and epigenetics for biotic and abiotic stresses, molecular dynamics simulation, and NGS-based marker discovery in wheat. His group also decoded Karnal bunt genomes, the development of SSR markers for population structure, and diversity analysis of bunts and smut fungi. He teaches courses in Molecular Biology and Computational Biology to graduate students. Dr. Sharma has published more than 110 national and international research papers, 25 invited chap ters, eight scientific review articles, and he has edited seven books on biotic and abiotic stresses including RNAi tech nology. Dr. Sharma was conferred the Young Scientist’s Award (biannual 2005 2006) of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences; the Pran Vohra Award (2008 2009) of the Indian Science Congress Association; a Fellow of the National Academy of Biological Sciences (2015); a Fellow of the Indian Virological Society (2012); and a Fellow of the Society for Advancement of Wheat and Barley Research (2019). He has worked at and visited many pioneering lab oratories of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, China, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Turkey, and Israel.
Affiliations and expertise
Principle Scientist, 201A Crop Improvement Division, ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research, Karnal, Haryana, India