Student Speaker Award Recipients
Anju Biswas
Anju Biswas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Agronomy Department at the University of Florida, expected to graduate in Fall 2022. She works with Dr. Esteban Rios in Forage Breeding and Genomics lab. Originally, she is from Bangladesh and earned her Bachelor's in Agriculture and her first Masters in Genetics and Plant Breeding from there. Then she started her second Master’s at Delaware State University (DSU) in Plant Science to expand her plant science research skills. She worked with horticultural crops, genetics, and tissue culture before beginning her Ph.D. After finishing the 2nd Master’s, she started her Ph.D. at UF with the ambition to lead a research team and contribute to the breeders' community. Now she is working on alfalfa breeding using Phenomics, Genomics, and Crop Modeling to develop locally adapted alfalfa cultivars to meet the local forage demand. She is very interested both in research development and mentoring students and open to working either in academia or industry upon completing her Ph.D.
Edgar Sierra
Edgar Sierra was born and raised in Mexico. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Plant Science from the Universidad Autonoma Chapingo, Mexico. Upon graduation in 2009, he was hired as a pest and disease manager for a 36-hectare farm producing bell peppers, blueberries, and blackberries. After working there for 7 years, in 2016 he obtained the Fulbright award and moved to Florida to pursue his master’s degree at UF. He graduated with a Master in Horticultural Sciences in December of 2018. Since January 2019, he has been working towards his PhD, also at the University of Florida. He is a student at the tomato breeding lab at the GCREC-UF. The focus of his research is the identification of resistance to target spot of tomato caused by Corynespora cassiicola, in
tomato wild relatives, characterization and mapping of major resistance genes/QTLs, and advancement of resistance into cultivated tomato.
Sandeep Chapagain
Sandeep Chapagain is Ph.D. Candidate in School of Plant, Soil, and Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University, Agricultural Center, USA. He has completed MS Agriculture (2018) from Kangwon National University, South Korea and BS Agriculture Science (2014) Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He joined LSU in 2018 Fall in PhD program with crop plants genetics lab under the supervision of Professor Dr. Prasant Subudhi. His PhD research is focused on abiotic stress tolerance breeding and genetics, specially salinity tolerance rice breeding. He has published more than 10 research articles and two book chapters as first and coauthor. Besides academia, he is interested in volunteering, leadership and professional development programs. His future research goal is to develop climate resilient crop varieties for future food security along with understanding molecular mechanisms of stress physiology and adaptation mechanisms by plants.