Prof. (Dr.) R.K. Gaur earned his Ph.D. in 2005, and is now a Professor at the Department of Biotechnology, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. His Ph.D. was on the molecular characterization of sugarcane viruses, i.e., mosaic, streak mosaic, and yellow luteovirus. He received a MASHAV fellowship of the Israeli government for his postdoctoral studies and joined The Volcani Center, Israel and Ben-Gurion University, Negev, Israel. In 2007 he received the Visiting Scientist Fellowship from the Swedish Institute, Sweden to work at Umea˚ University, Umea˚, Sweden. He received a postdoc fellowship from ICGEB, Italy in 2008. He has made significant contributions on sugarcane viruses and has pub lished 130 national/international papers, authored 17 edited books and presented about 50 papers at national and international conferences. He has been honored as a Fellow of Linnean Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of the Society of Plant Research, a Fellow of the Society of Applied Biology (FSAB), and a Fellow of the International Society of Biotechnology (FISBT). He has received many other awards, including the Prof. B.M. Johri memorial Award, Society of Plant Research (SPR); Excellent Teaching Award by Astha Foundation, Meerut; UGC-Research Teacher Award; Young Scientist Award in 2012 in Biotechnology by the Society of Plant Research (SPR), Meerut; and Scientific and Applied Research Center Gold Medal Award in 2011 for outstanding contribution in the field of Biotechnology. He has visited several laborato ries in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Thailand, Sweden, and Italy. Currently, he is han dling many national and international grants and international collaborative projects on plant viruses and disease management Dr. S. M. Paul Khurana (new editor with this edition) is the Director of Amity Institute of Biotechnology, Amity University, is the former Vice Chancellor of Rani Durgavati Vishwavidyalaya, and Retired Director of the Central Potato Research Institute. Dr. Khurana has a PHD (1968) and MSc (1965) from University of Gorakhpur. He spent two years doing post-doctoral work on Advanced Plant Virology at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He also worked at University of Minnesota, St. Paul (USA) on Immunodiagnostics (bio-technology) during a sabbatical of one year from 1987-88. He established a school of plant virology at CPRI, Shimla and has trained very large number of workers and students from the country and abroad. Dr. Khurana has published over 130 original research papers in journals of repute/high impact and he has also authored more than 75 reviews/book chapters. His research career achievements include the standardization and use of enzyme linked immuno sorbent assay (ELISA) and immuno sorbent electron microscopy (ISEM) for detection of potato viruses, development of simple techniques for screening of resistance to potato viruses, apart from pioneering work in detection of plant diseases; associated with selection/release of eight potato varieties including the first ever two processing varieties in India. Besides his extensive management experience, he has guided ten PhD students, written many monographs/bulletins and authored/edited eight books/conference proceedings. http://www.amity.edu/aims/profiles/smp_khurana.pdf Dr. Sharma’s research focuses on Agriculture Biotechnology, specifically on the characterization of genes and SSRs for abiotic stresses (drought and heat) and understating the role of epigenetics, Gene silencing and small RNAs in for wheat improvement. He has been associated with several networking projects funded as Agri-Bioinformatics Promotion Program, ACIAR-DST, and DBT-BBSRC, ICAR Networking projects on AMMAS, Cabin and AMAAS schemes etc. He has published 90 peer reviewed papers, editor of six books published in CRC, Elsevier and Academic Press, and 20 book chapters. Dr Sharma has been associated with a recently released bread wheat variety DBW71 and three trait specific genetic and has been awarded with ICAR-Lal Bahadur Shastri Outstanding Young Scientist Award, NAAS- Young Scientist 2007 and ISCA- Pran Vohra Awards. Dr Sharma is Chief Editor of Journal of Cereal Research and editorial of several journals.
