Recognizing The Plant Cell author Hardik P. Gala

Hardik P. Gala, first author of A single cell view of the transcriptome during lateral root initiation in Arabidopsis thaliana

Current Position:  Postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Jennifer Nemhauser  @ University of Washington, Department of Biology­

Education: PhD in Cell biology with Prof. Jyotsna Dhawan @ CSIR-CCMB, India

Non-scientific Interests:  Traveling, Leisure cooking and playing board games

Brief bio: My general interests lie in understanding the mechanisms that guide the fate of cells during development. During my doctoral work with Prof. Jyotsna Dhawan, I studied the global transcriptional mechanisms underlying cellular quiescence of muscle stem cells. My continued excitement in understanding the connections between cell division control and cell fate drove me to plant development where we see an enormous morphological plasticity throughout the organism’s lifetime. I first chose to explore meiosis in Arabidopsis, as a short postdoc with Prof. Imran Siddiqi @ CSIR-CCMB, and later lateral root development with Prof. Jennifer Nemhauser @ University of Washington. In the Nemhauser lab, my research explores the signaling and molecular changes that allow a very small number of cells to begin dividing and become a new root. In the future, I am excited to use a comparative approach to study how control mechanisms might differ across diverse plant lineages.