Rashmi Sasidharan appointed Professor of Plant Stress Resilience

Prof. Rashmi Sasidharan Utrecht University has appointed biologist Rashmi Sasidharan as Professor of Plant Stress Resilience. Together with her research group, Sasidharan aims to pinpoint the mechanisms that help plants cope with stressful environments. This knowledge will pave the way toward more climate-resilient crops. While access to a reliable food supply is taken for granted in most Western societies, the future poses significant challenges for food security. Producing enough food to feed a rapidly expanding human population will be a big challenge, as harvests get increasingly decimated by erratic weather events related to climate change. 0One strategy to combat this is generating crop varieties that can cope with temperature and precipitation extremes. This requires a deeper understanding of mechanisms that aid plant survival in unfavourable environments, which will be the primary goal of Sasidharan's Plant Stress Resilience group.