Prof Navjot Kaur currently serves as an Assistant Dean, UG Outreach and Admissions and an Assistant Professor at Plaksha University. Academically trained as a chemical engineer, she fell in love with biology during her graduate studies. She earned her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, where she worked on developing point-of-care molecular diagnostics. Before joining Plaksha University as a founding faculty member, she was a Research Scientist at Reddy's Laboratories, one of India's leading generic pharmaceutical companies.
As a founding faculty member, she is actively involved in outreach and admissions, culture building, and the Young Technology Scholars (YTS) programme at Plaksha University. She is a systems thinker, passionate about sustainable food production and consumption. Her group develops holistic solutions that integrate technology development, responsible innovation, and stakeholder engagement to address the grand challenge of food security. She teaches courses on Nature's Machines, Molecular Biology, and Nucleic Acid and Protein Biosensors.
For more information, please visit her research webpage.
Prof Kaur's group conducted an extensive field-study surveying 600 farmers across 200 villages in 8 different districts of Punjab to understand the agricultural ecosystem and connect with the farming communities. Continued interactions of her group with farming communities in Punjab highlighted the prevalence of fungal diseases in the state farms and the excessive use of agrochemicals to manage crop diseases.
Extensive agricultural activities have also polluted and depleted the natural environment in the state; including soil, water and air. Her research is focused on developing sustainable therapeutics to improve the agriculture ecosystems in Punjab and overtime extend their findings and technologies to the rest of the country.
Prof Kaur's current projects include:
- Development of fungal biocontrol agents to manage fungal infestations in crops like rice and tomato,
- Evaluation and validation of use of biochar to increase soil carbon content and water retention, and
- Understanding and improving soil fungal microbiome to increase carbon sequestration and hence soil fertility.
Driven to create effective technology and social engineering solutions, farmers and consumers are at the centre of everything they do!