Prof. (Dr.) R.K. Gaur earned his Ph.D. in 2005, and is now a Professor at the Department of Biotechnology, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. His Ph.D. was on the molecular characterization of sugarcane viruses, i.e., mosaic, streak mosaic, and yellow luteovirus. He received a MASHAV fellowship of the Israeli government for his postdoctoral studies and joined The Volcani Center, Israel and Ben-Gurion University, Negev, Israel. In 2007 he received the Visiting Scientist Fellowship from the Swedish Institute, Sweden to work at Umea˚ University, Umea˚, Sweden. He received a postdoc fellowship from ICGEB, Italy in 2008. He has made significant contributions on sugarcane viruses and has pub lished 130 national/international papers, authored 17 edited books and presented about 50 papers at national and international conferences. He has been honored as a Fellow of Linnean Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of the Society of Plant Research, a Fellow of the Society of Applied Biology (FSAB), and a Fellow of the International Society of Biotechnology (FISBT). He has received many other awards, including the Prof. B.M. Johri memorial Award, Society of Plant Research (SPR); Excellent Teaching Award by Astha Foundation, Meerut; UGC-Research Teacher Award; Young Scientist Award in 2012 in Biotechnology by the Society of Plant Research (SPR), Meerut; and Scientific and Applied Research Center Gold Medal Award in 2011 for outstanding contribution in the field of Biotechnology. He has visited several laborato ries in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Thailand, Sweden, and Italy. Currently, he is han dling many national and international grants and international collaborative projects on plant viruses and disease management Dr. Pradeep Sharma received his Ph.D. in 2002 on the cloning and characterization of cotton leaf curl viruses. He performed his postdoctoral research (2006 2008) at Tohoku University, Japan with Prof M Ikegami as a JSPS fellow, where he worked on RNA silencing. He also undertook postdoctoral work at the ARO Volcani Center, Israel with Prof Y Gafni (2006 2006), focusing on the nuclear import of genes using yeast one hybrid system, as a DST scientist (2006), as a visiting scientist at South Dakota State University (2011) investigating allele mining and comparative genomics in rice, and at Oklahoma State University (2016) on small noncoding RNAs. In 2008, Dr. Sharma joined the faculty in the Department of Crop Improvement at ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research, Karnal, where he is the Principal Scientist. He directs a research group studying the role of sRNAs and epigenetics for biotic and abiotic stresses, molecular dynamics simulation, and NGS-based marker discovery in wheat. His group also decoded Karnal bunt genomes, the development of SSR markers for population structure, and diversity analysis of bunts and smut fungi. He teaches courses in Molecular Biology and Computational Biology to graduate students. Dr. Sharma has published more than 110 national and international research papers, 25 invited chap ters, eight scientific review articles, and he has edited seven books on biotic and abiotic stresses including RNAi tech nology. Dr. Sharma was conferred the Young Scientist’s Award (biannual 2005 2006) of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences; the Pran Vohra Award (2008 2009) of the Indian Science Congress Association; a Fellow of the National Academy of Biological Sciences (2015); a Fellow of the Indian Virological Society (2012); and a Fellow of the Society for Advancement of Wheat and Barley Research (2019). He has worked at and visited many pioneering lab oratories of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, China, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Turkey, and Israel. Prof. (Dr.) Henryk Czosnek earned his Ph.D. in 1978 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working on protein synthesis in the liver. He took a postdoctoral position of Senior Research Scientist at the NY State Institute for Basic Research in Mental Disabilities, New York, USA, working on the biochemistry of brain degenerative diseases. He joined the Weizmann Institute in 1980, Rehovot, Israel, and worked on the cloning and expression of mammalian muscle genes. In 1985 Dr. Czosnek joined the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel. He was on sabbatical leave in 1990 at the CNRS at Gif sur Yvette, France, working with Dr. Bruno Gronenborn on begomoviruses, and in 2000 at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA working with Prof. Judith Brown on the transcriptome of the whitefly Bemisia tabaci. He was a full Professor from 1996 and emeritus from 2017. Prof. Czosnek has investigated the relationships between begomoviruses, their whitefly vector, and the host plants. He has led funded collaborative projects with many countries in the Middle East, Southern Africa, the Maghreb, Europe, the United States, Central America and the Caribbean, India, and China, on the topics of plants’ viral diseases and their management. Prof. Czosnek is teaching courses on Genetic Engineering, Plant Molecular Biology, and Molecular Genetics.
