Govind Vediyappan is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University, Manhattan KS. He completed his undergraduate, Master's, and Ph. D. degrees in Botany at the University of Madras, Chennai, India. His Ph. D. work was on characterizing an antifungal enzyme, chitinase, in the peanut plant elicited in response to the rust fungal pathogen, Puccinia arachidis. After completing his Ph. D degree, he moved to North America for postdoctoral training. During his postdoctoral training at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, TX, he learned various aspects of Candida albicans biology and bacterial drug-efflux mechanism. Subsequently, he moved to the Institute Pasteur, Paris France and worked briefly with Dr. Christophe d’ Enfert on antifungal drug resistance mechanisms. While working at the Institute Pasteur, Govind developed an additional project on discovering antifungal compounds against C. albicans from natural product sources which allowed him to establish his future research career.
After returning to the US for a faculty position at Kansas State University, he established his research group focusing on C. albicans pathogenesis, fungal-bacterial interaction, drug resistance mechanisms, and developing antimicrobial agents for therapeutic purposes. Govind is passionate about his research and he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the Microbiology field. Currently, he mentors postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate researchers in his lab and he loves helping students to achieve their dream goals. He is a member of various professional societies and received several awards including the Research Scholar Award from Kansas Idea Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, Kansas City.
