Recognizing Plant Direct authors: Puneet Paul
Puneet Paul, first author of Divergent phenotypic response of rice accessions to transient heat stress during early seed development
Current Position: Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Education: Ph.D. in Plant Molecular Biology, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
M.Sc. Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Dept. of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi, India
B.Sc. Botany (Hons.), Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, India
Non-scientific Interests: reading non-fiction
Brief bio: I obtained my bachelor’s and master’s degree in Plant Science from the University of Delhi, India. After that I joined Prof. Anil Grover’s lab as a project assistant and worked on protein-protein interaction of heat stress responsive proteins in rice. I next moved to Germany to pursue a Ph.D. in the lab of Prof. Enrico Schleiff at Goethe University. Here, I was fortunate enough to be a part of a Marie Curie Initial Training Network that was established to investigate the fundamentals of pollen thermotolerance in tomato. My project focused on understanding protein homeostasis during pollen development at higher temperatures. In mid-2016, I joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the lab of Dr. Harkamal Walia as a post-doc where I am now working on understanding the regulation of seed development in rice. I would like to acknowledge all my mentors for excellent guidance throughout my career. Related to this publication, we studied the phenotypic variation in a set of diverse rice accessions for elucidating the heat stress response during early seed development.
