Improving Crops for Future Sustainability and Climate Resilience

Dr. Suprasanna Penna is currently a professor and Director at the Amity Institute of Nuclear Biotechnology, Amity University of Maharashtra, India. He was formerly with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, as the Head of Nuclear Agriculture and Biotechnology Division. He is also an IAEA expert consultant. His significant contributions to plant science include plant biotechnology, mutation breeding, stress tolerance, and biopolymers for enhancing plant productivity in crop plants and vegetables. His research on plant abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants and halophytes led to elucidating mechanisms of salinity tolerance and salt adaptation. He is on the editorial board of several international journals and has published over 430 publications. He has edited several books on plant mutation breeding, salinity tolerance, plant genetic diversity, halophytes, doubled haploids and plant-metal interactions.

Professor Rajeev K. Varshney FRS, FAA is a globally recognised agricultural scientist and leading authority in crop genomics and molecular breeding. He is Professor at the Food Futures Institute, Murdoch University, Australia, where he directs the Centre for Crop & Food Innovation and the Western Australian State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, and serves as International Chair in Agriculture & Food Security. Formerly Global Research Program Director at ICRISAT, he has pioneered the sequencing and genomic analysis of numerous crops, developed pangenomes and super-pangenomes, and delivered more than twenty climate-resilient, high-yielding crop varieties adopted across Asia, Africa, and Australia.  A Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher for eleven consecutive years, Professor Varshney has authored over 450 research papers and several books, trained hundreds of scientists worldwide, and received more than thirty prestigious awards. He is a Fellow of over a dozen academies and scientific societies, including The Royal Society, and academies from Australia, the United States, Germany, Italy, and India—reflecting his lasting impact on global agriculture and food security.