Prof. Rita Sharma(Associate Professor)
Department of Biological Sciences
BITS Pilani,
Pilani Campus.
Prof. Sharma is currently an Associate Professor at Department of Biological Sciences, BITS
Pilani, Pilani Campus. She pursued her Ph.D. in Plant Molecular Biology from University of
Delhi South Campus, New Delhi. Thereafter, she moved to University of California, Davis for
her postdoctoral research. After getting selected for Ramalingaswami Re-entry fellowship,
Prof. Sharma returned back to India in 2014 and joined School of Life Sciences at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi as Ramalingaswami fellow. In 2015, she was appointed as
UGC-Assistant Professor at School of Computational & Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. During her tenure at JNU, she also worked as visiting scientist at
University of California Berkeley and Joint BioEnergy Institute, U.S.A for a year.
Prof. Sharma’s research leverages the synergism of plant biotechnology with computational
biology for crop improvement. In collaboration with researchers within and outside the
country, she has contributed to development of several databases, tools, and high throughput
genomic and transcriptomic resources for grass genomics and improvement. With recent
revelations of not-so-dark matter of genome, her lab is currently using functional genomic
approaches for investigating both coding and non-coding transcriptional signatures
responsible for determining organismal biology and diversity in the plant world.
