2024 SIVB Fellow Award

Dr. Raj Deepika Chauhan

2024 SIVB Fellow Award

Dr. Raj Deepika Chauhan wins the 2024 SIVB Fellow Award

In recognition of her contributions to the field of in vitro biology, and her dedicated service to SIVB for the past 10 years Dr. Raj Deepika Chauhan was recognized with the 2024 SIVB Fellow Award. Previously, she was also the recipient of the 2019 Young Scientist Award from the society.

Deepika is an expert in plant biotechnology, genetic engineering and product development. She is currently an Associate Director of plant transformation at Pairwise, Durham, NC, where she leads a team of about 16 scientists who have developed plant tissue culture and transformation methods to introduce consumer preferred traits in leafy greens. Their efforts resulted in the launching of the first Pairwise product (Karlson et al., 2022). She also leads the scientific strategy and execution teams to improve selected berries using gene editing. She received the 2023 Accelerator Award at Pairwise for her contributions in advancing products and the business.

Deepika received her early education in India followed by post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, USA. She has proven to be an excellent scientist in plant biotechnology with demonstrated expertise in plant tissue culture and gene editing to generate plants with desirable traits such as disease resistance, pest resistance, herbicide tolerance, and nutritional enhancement. She has developed in vitro systems for a variety of plant species, such as cassava, pomegranate, sweet potato, soybean, Eucalyptus, Populus, and Tef.

Her research at the University of Pretoria was on eucalyptus improvement and she identified transcription factors that regulate cellulose biosynthesis in secondary cell walls of wood fiber cells for increased cellulose biosynthesis. Subsequently, at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, she worked on three major cassava improvement projects, Virus Resistant Cassava for Africa (VIRCA), Biocassava Plus (BCPlus) and targeted gene editing for herbicide tolerance. She led a team of researchers to develop an improved cassava transformation system (Chauhan et al. 2015; Chauhan, et al., 2014). Her team developed varieties that are resistant to cassava brown streak disease (CBSD). They also generated cassava plants that accumulate high levels of pro-vitamin A (Nature Biotech., 2019), and gene edited herbicide tolerant cassava (Plant Biotech. J., 2018).

During her successful career, she also worked on other aspects such as transformation systems to introduce insect resistance in pomegranate (Chauhan and Kanwar 2012), and plant protease inhibitors as defensive tools against pests. Besides publishing over 40 scientific papers, she was the guest editor for a special issue of the ‘Protease Inhibitors’ (Vol 6, Functional Plant Science and Biotechnology 2012).

Deepika has been active in mentoring and training students and researchers. For example, she helped train 10 graduate students in Pretoria, and at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center she trained students/researchers from several countries including, China, Vietnam, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Columbia on cassava transformation systems. She mentored and managed a team responsible for producing over 1000 transgenic plant lines annually at the Danforth Center, where she also served as a co-chair of the Committee for Scientific Training and Mentoring that conducted scientific workshops and trainings for students and early career scientists. More recently, she has been responsible for hiring, establishing and developing teams for plant transformation at Pairwise.

Dr. Chauhan has been an active member of SIVB since 2014. Most of the attendees at the recent SIVB annual meetings would be familiar with Deepika’s active participation as a session convener, committee chair/member, etc. Her service is evident from the numerous distinguished service awards she won during the annual meetings in 2018, 2021 and 2023. Overall, Deepika has been an extremely active member serving the SIVB.

Submitted by

Prakash Kumar
Joyce Van Eck