Dr. A. Senthil, Professor and Head
Dr. A. Senthil, Professor of Crop Physiology, is currently working on “Understanding the physiology of minor millets for improving yield and abiotic stress tolerance”. Also, his research focus is on unraveling the physiological and molecular aspects of C4 photosynthetic mechanism and abiotic stress tolerance in cereals and millets through genetic diversity analysis and genomics approaches.
He has specialized in “Phenotyping for abiotic stress tolerance” and trained in IRRI, Philippines and INRA, France. He has vast experience in drought tolerance improvement in rice for water limited environments through marker assisted selection and QTL introgression. Also, he was associated with Drought tolerance improvement programs sponsored by IRRI-India network, Rockefeller foundation and Bill Melinda Gates foundation.
He contributed in the evaluation and release of PMK 4 (Anna 4) a popular drought tolerant rice variety in Tamil Nadu.
He got opportunity to work on “Transformation of lowland rice with DREB genes and evaluation of transformed rice for environmental stress tolerance” as Visiting Research Fellow in IRRI, Philippines.
He was conferred with Rao Birendra Singh award and gold medal for the best Ph.D. student in Crop Physiology during the year 2001.
He published one text book, 5 edited books, 25 book chapters and 45 research articles in refereed national and international journals.
He has handled 5 externally funded research projects as Principal Investigator and 5 research projects as Co-PI, at present he is handling 4 externally funded research projects. As research guide, he supervised 8 M.Sc students and one Ph.D student and currently, guiding 2 M.Sc and 2 Ph.D students.