Laura S. van Dam

Lavanya Dampanaboina is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science, Texas Tech University (TTU), Lubbock, Texas. She obtained her Bachelor’s in Microbiology, Master’s in Genetics, from Osmania University, India and a Ph.D. in Plant Physiology, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry program from the University of Kentucky, KY, USA.

During her scientific career as a graduate student (2005-2011), she acquired experience in studying RNA Polyadenylation, protein interactions that affect protein network functions, gene expression studies by using different plant physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology tools. As a Post-doctoral research scholar (2012-2018) at Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB, India), USDA-ARS (USA) and TTU (USA), she gained experience in identification and characterization of proteins involved in plant disease resistance in rice, hormonal regulation of spikelet filling and rhizosphere microbiome composition changes in sorghum mutants. Then, in 2018, she was recruited as a Visiting Assistant Professor at TTU. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses in plant pathology with lab, and developed the same course with lab for online and distance courses. Further, she developed her research program (2019-current) in cotton and soybean genome editing for crop trait improvement, as well as improving disease resistance in cotton. Her future research goal is to decipher the genes and regulatory pathways involved in rhizosphere microbiome signaling pathways, biochemical secretion systems and microbiome composition analysis. Cotton Inc., USDA and BASF funding supports her research.