Rashmi Thakur

Finger millet is stubborn in the best way. It grows on thin soil, tolerates heat that flattens rice, and has been eaten across India for four thousand years. It is also badly under-studied, which means almost every experiment tells you something nobody has written down yet.

I spend most mornings in tissue culture and most afternoons in RStudio. The through-line is a single question: which regulatory genes decide whether a seedling survives drought and salt together, rather than one at a time? Combined stress behaves nothing like the sum of its parts, and that gap is where my thesis lives.

Alongside the editing work, I maintain the lab's transformation protocols, run the qPCR bench, and supervise two masters students through their dissertation projects. I read broadly outside my area — nanocarrier chemistry, soil microbiology, agricultural policy — because the useful ideas usually arrive from next door.

A cultivar that survives a failed monsoon is worth more than a perfect result in a growth chamber.