Dr. Tapan Kumar Mondal joined at Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (CSIR), Himachal Pradesh, India, for his Ph.D degree which he completed in 1998. After that, he served as Deputy Manager, Research and Development Department, Tata Tatley Ltd, Munnar, Kerala till March, 2002. Since then up to 2010, he further served as Assistant Professor at North Bengal Agricultural University, Cooch Behar, West Bengal. Later in February 2010, he joined as Senior Scientist (Plant Biotechnology) at National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resource (ICAR), New Delhi. He carried out his Post Doctoral training with Prof. J. K. Zhu of University of California, Riverside, USA, on ‘Regulation of small RNA under cold stress of Arabidopsis’ and later worked at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, on ‘Identification of nitrogen use efficient genes of maize by RNAseq’. Dr. Mondal has significantly contributed in various areas of biotechnology and genetic resource management of tea. His work leads to develop the first transgenic tea plants. He has also submitted several gene sequences of tea at NCBI and also published more than 60 publications in this area. He was PI of various projects of tea biotechnology funded by DBT, DST, ICAR and Tea Board, India. He is the recipient of University merit scholarship, scholarship from Indian Tea association, ICAR JRF, DBT fellowship, CSIR fellowship and life member of several professional societies. He also bagged ‘Young scientist award’ by Korean Society of Tea Science in 2003 and Japan Tea Science Society in 2004.
