Principal Investigator
FASc, FNA
Professor of Plant Genetics
Department of Plant Sciences, Deccan Institute of Science
Swarnajayanti Fellow
Chair, Climate-Resilient Crops Programme
Ananya leads the lab. She has never met a rice field she didn’t want to walk through.
Ananya Rao is Professor of Plant Genetics at the Deccan Institute of Science, where she leads a group of twenty researchers working on crop resilience.
Her group mapped the gene that lets a wild rice survive two weeks under water, and helped breed it into varieties now grown on thousands of farms. Before starting her lab she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, and she received her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science.
Academic portfolio
Professor of Plant Genetics, Deccan Institute of Science
Associate Professor, Deccan Institute of Science
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge
PhD in Plant Genetics, Indian Institute of Science
Thesis: The genetics of flooding tolerance in rice
MSc in Botany, University of Hyderabad
Swarnajayanti Fellowship, National Research Foundation
Fellow, Academy of Sciences
Young Scientist Medal, National Science Academy
Associate Editor, Journal of Crop Genetics
Chair, Climate-Resilient Crops Programme, Deccan Institute of Science
Genes for a warming world, International Plant Genomics Conference
Breeding with farmers, Gordon Research Conference on Plant Stress