Understanding how plants adapt to changing environements

Hello/Nnọọ! My name is Chosen Obih, and I am a PhD student in the Melandri Lab, at the University of Arizona. I grew up in Southeastern Nigeria where I got my M.Sc. in Plant Sciences and Biotechnology from the University of Nigeria Nsukka, and a B.Sc. in Biotechnology from Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu. Before joining the University of Arizona’s Plant Sciences PhD program, I was an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu, and a Lead Instructor at DNA Learning Center Nigeria, a science education center dedicated to supporting and facilitating molecular biology hands-on laboratory training in Nigeria and Africa.

My research focuses on unraveling how plants sense and respond to environmental changes and how we can leverage this knowledge to develop crop varieties that are resilient to climate challenges. Specifically, I am interested in the molecular, biochemical and physiological mechanisms that enable plants to withstand stresses like drought and heat. By applying large-scale comparative omics approaches—encompassing genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and epitranscriptomics—I aim to uncover traits that enhance stress tolerance in crops. My current project investigates these adaptive responses in crop grasses to identify key traits and molecular pathways that can be targeted to breed high-performing, resilient crops. This research has significant implications for sustainable agriculture, particularly in regions vulnerable to climate extremes, where improving crop tolerance is essential for food security. Before joining the Melandri Lab, I was part of the Lyons Lab, where I developed scalable high-throughput computational pipelines to process RNA-seq data, specifically focusing on the annotation of post-transcriptional modifications (PTMs) and long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs). I’m committed to combining computational biology and plant science approaches to address critical agricultural challenges.