The Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture welcomes Gautam Shirsekar as an assistant professor. Shirsekar joined the team on February 1, 2024.
In this role, Shirsekar will spearhead the development of a dynamic and impactful research program that investigates coevolutionary interactions within wild crop pathosystems by integrating the fields of plant disease ecology, genomics, population genomics, computational biology, and molecular evolution. Additionally, Shirsekar will serve as a mentor to both undergraduate and graduate students.
“I look forward to unraveling how crop wild relatives and pathogens coevolve in their natural habitats,” Shirsekat said. “In the long term, I plan to develop an analytical framework that focuses on restricting the emergence of new pathogenic strains through optimal use of the “wild” ancestry in cultivated crops. I also look forward to training a new generation of plant pathologists who will discover the evolutionary principles of host-pathogen interactions at the population and genomic level which can then be utilized for sustainable crop disease management.”
Shirsekar has extensive experience in applied plant pathology (wheat rust disease resistance breeding) and molecular plant pathology (rice-rice blast molecular interactions) from his formative years of research at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and Ohio State University. He plans to leverage this experience with the evolutionary and mathematical thinking that he developed during his stay in Germany, to understand how North American wild grapes coevolve against economically important downy mildew pathogen Plasmopara viticola. Tennessee has seen tremendous growth in viticulture in recent years, and plant diseases pose severe challenges to grape production. Fortunately, Tennessee’s central location in a region of tremendous wild grape diversity is advantageous yet underexplored. Some of this diversity has already been incorporated into cultivated grape germplasm across North America. Shirsekar’s focus on understanding the coevolutionary dynamics between wild grapes and its downy mildew disease at the most fundamental level will lead to innovative solutions to sustainably manage the disease using evolutionary principles. Thus, Shirsekar’s research will benefit not only Tennessee vineyards but also those spanning the region of the Appalachian Mountain range.
In Shirsekar’s spare time, he enjoys astrophotography, hiking, and learning new programming languages. To learn more about Shirsekar and his research, visit www.coevolutionlab.org.