My interest in plant biology came quite naturally to me because in my country native, India, environmental stresses occur in an unpredictable manner but the agricultural activity is intensive and the dependent population is large. During PhD and postdoctoral research with Dr. Verslues' group in Academia Sinica, Taiwan, I analyzed stress function of PP2Cs in Arabidopsis. Currently, I am working with Thomas Juenger group at U.T. Austin to study drought resistance mechanisms in switchgrass.