Understanding how plants sense and respond to changing environments

Hello/Nnọọ! My name is Chosen Obih, and I am a PhD student in the Melandri Lab in the School of Plant Sciences 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 interest lies on understanding how plants perceive and respond to changing environments, and how we can apply these knowledge in developing improved high performing crop varieties that can withstand our changing climate. My current project focuses on using large-scale comparative omics approaches to decipher the cellular and physiological response of crop grasses to drought and heat stress. Prior to joining the Melandri Lab, I was part of the Lyons Lab, where my research focused on the development of high-throughput computational pipelines for processing RNA-Seq data for post-transcriptional modifications (PTMs).