Meet the academics and graduate researchers involved in the Sustainable Agricultural Production research group.
Group leader
A/Prof Dorin Gupta
Associate Professor Dorin Gupta, a distinguished crop scientist and educator, with almost two decades of academic experience in India and Australia. Holder of the prestigious Vavilov Frankel Fellowship, her research focuses on enhancing sustainability, efficiency, and stress resilience in staple and native crops, covering agronomy, pathology, genetics, and genomics.
dorin.gupta@unimelb.edu.auStaff
Dr Sajitha Biju
Sajitha, a seasoned crop scientist, has an extensive research and teaching background in Australia and India. Her research interests span silicon, legumes, sustainable food production, nutritional aspects, plant stress physiology, and biochemistry. Currently, she is investigating Silicon’s role in managing symbiotic nitrogen fixation in drought-stressed lentils for her Melbourne post-doctoral fellowship.
sajitha.biju@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Omid Alasti
Omid, an accomplished crop science researcher, excels in multi-scale research endeavours. His research interests encompass crop production gap analysis, crop simulation modelling, climate change impacts on crop production, and data analysis. Omid contributed to prestigious projects such as Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA) and food security analysis until 2050 over Iran.
Colette Day
Colette is involved in the Future Drought Fund project Redesigning Broadacre Farming Systems in SE Australia, and supports work on native crops and grasses at UniMelb. Colette worked as a food scientist in industry for over 35 years on major Australian brands with leadership positions in dairy, food formulation, consumer research and marketing.
Sineka Munidasa
Sineka is a research assistant for the ACIAR-funded project. She has 4 years of research experience in Australia. Her research interests include addressing climate change impacts on agricultural production systems, including both adaptation and mitigation efforts. Additionally, I am interested in promoting sustainability within the agricultural systems.
Collaborators
A/Prof Surinder Singh Chauhan
Associate Professor Surinder Singh Chauhan is an animal scientist, leading research programs to deliver sustainable and efficient livestock production systems (cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs) for quality animal protein for consumers. This is achieved by developing strategies to mitigate heat stress impacts, reducing methane emission, and to identify and deliver innovative tools to improve meat quality.
ss.chauhan@unimelb.edu.au +61383444744Dr Gayathri Mekala
Dr Gayathri Mekala is a lecturer based at Dookie campus. She is a gender-in-agriculture specialist and a social scientist with international experience in social, gender, institutional, governance and public policy aspects of agriculture, water resources and urban green infrastructure.
gayathri.mekala@unimelb.edu.au +61358339220
Dr Vili Iese
Te’o Lau Dr. Viliamu Iese (Vili) is the Associate Director Vic Drought Hub, and a Senior Research Fellow based at Dookie campus. He conducts research in risk resilience in agriculture, the impacts climate change on food systems and livelihoods, diets and health, climate-change loss and damage, and evaluation of climate-change adaptations in Pacific SIDS.
viliamu.iese@unimelb.edu.auStudents
Olajumoke Ogedengbe (Jummy)
Olajumoke Ogedengbe (Jummy) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on enhancing plant resilience to drought stress by exploring various silicon application approaches. With over a decade of experience, she has contributed to numerous projects as an agricultural officer for the government of Nigeria.
Navya Beera
Navya is currently pursuing a doctorate degree at the University of Melbourne. Her research is focused on enhancing lentil crops resilience to abiotic and biotic stresses through silica supplementation.
Alumni
Dr Hari Dadu
Hari obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne (2019). His research identified and characterised the resistance sources to Ascochyta blight within lentil genotypes. He currently manages the cereal disease program at AgVic Horsham, and his research investigates the epidemiology and developing management strategies for foliar diseases of wheat, barley and oats.
Dr Mahya Tavan
Mahya’s PhD research centred on soilless vertical farming ensuring resource efficient micronutrient cultivation, including biofortification strategies. Mahya is currently undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship as part of the Sustainable Nutrition initiative (SNi) at The Riddet Institute, New Zealand. Her current research is focused on dietary modelling and understanding sustainable healthy diets.
Waseem Ashfaq
Waseem is a crop science researcher with more than decade of research experience in Australia and abroad. His research interests include cereal physiology, sustainable food production and agronomy. Currently, he is working in a multi-disciplinary team to evaluate the potential of different farming systems practices to enhance the farm’s overall profitability, sustainability and adaptation to climate change.
Dr Razlin Azman
Razlin is a legume researcher with a decade of research experience in Australia and abroad. Her research interests include crop adaptation to biotic and abiotic stress, nutritional composition, nitrogen fixation, seed quality, metabolomics and high throughput non-destructive analysis. She is part of a multidisciplinary team investigating practices to improve drought resilience of broadacre farms.