AMU alumnus elected Fellow of Royal Society
ALIGARH : Prof Rajeev Varshney, an alumnus of the Department of Botany, Aligarh Muslim University, has been elected to the Royal Society (FRS).
The chairman of the department, Prof M. Badruzzaman Siddiqui said that this honour is a noble gift to our department at a time when we are celebrating 100 years of its establishment in 1923.
The Royal Society of London has announced a list of 80 outstanding researchers and innovators and communicators from around the world elected to its fellowship for 2023 (https://royalsociety.org/news/2023/05/new-fellows-2023/). Among these is Prof Rajeev Varshney, who is now with Murdoch University (Australia) as Director of the Centre for Crop and Food Innovation; Western Australian State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre; and International Chair in Agriculture and Food Security. He is the only Indian scientist elected as FRS in the year 2023.
This impressive induction will make Prof Varshney the fourth Indian agricultural research scientist to receive this fellowship. The other three Indian agricultural scientists elected as FRS include Prof. BP Paul (elected in 1972), Prof. MS Swaminathan (elected in 1973) and Prof. Gurdev Khush (elected in 1995).
Prof Varshney said, “I feel humbled and honoured to have been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. This is like a dream come true for any scientist. I am thrilled to be included alongside the stalwarts and giants such as Norman Borlaug, MS Swaminathan, Jim Peacock, and Gurdev Khush, who have been inspirations and role models not only for me but all agricultural scientists across the world.”
“I am grateful to my colleagues and collaborators from Australia, India, Germany, and many countries in Asia, Africa, and America with whom I had the privilege of working with over the last 25 years”, he added.
Currently, Prof. Varshney’s Murdoch University-based team are working on improving wheat, legume and horticultural crops for agronomic, and abiotic stress tolerance traits by developing and deploying novel genomics approaches such as pangenomics, haplotype cataloguing and functional genomics approaches.