Recognizing Plant Direct first authors: Bhuvan Pathak

Bhuvan Pathak, co-first author of Heat-shock inducible CRISPR/Cas9 system generates heritable mutations in rice

Current Position: Senior Graduate Assistant

Education: PhD candidate, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA; MS Agronomy (2010) University of Florida, Gainesville; MS in Biotechnology (2004) and BS in Botany (2002) – Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar, India

Non-scientific Interests: Cooking, writing poems, reading

Brief Bio: I was deeply interested to work with plants since my high school days which led me to opt for botany as my undergraduate major. In the Fall of 2015, I joined my current advisor Prof. Vibha Srivastava’s lab at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville for my doctoral studies. Our lab focuses on developing recombinase technologies for plant transformation. We have investigated site specific gene integration and targeted gene deletions using Cre-lox and FLP-FRT systems, and now CRISPR/Cas9. My research  includes determining efficacy of multigene transformation in rice, and more recently the controlled expression of Cas9 in curbing the off-target effects.