Rate My Professor Devang Mehta

Devang Mehta serves as a tenure-track BOF assistant professor in the Department of Biosystems within the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering at KU Leuven since 2022. He holds memberships in the KU Leuven Institute for Single Cell Omics (LISCO) and the KU Leuven Plant Institute (LPI). His academic journey began with a B.Tech. in Biotechnology from the Vellore Institute of Technology, India (2008-2012), followed by an M.Res. in Systems and Synthetic Biology from Imperial College London (2012-2013), where he received the Jubilee Scholarship from The British Council. Mehta then pursued a Dr. Sc. in Plant Biotechnology (Science Policy) at ETH Zurich (2014-2018) as a Marie Curie IDP-BRIDGES Fellow. Subsequently, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Uhrig Lab at the University of Alberta from 2018 to 2022, supported by an SNSF Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Mehta's research centers on plant systems biology, chronobiology, synthetic biology, and proteomics, aiming to engineer plants for climate resilience through advanced transcriptomics and proteomics techniques. His laboratory, established in November 2022, investigates biomolecular interactions and agricultural chronotherapy to reduce herbicide use and enhance crop adaptability. Key contributions include discovering that twilight length alters growth and flowering time in Arabidopsis via LHY/CCA1 (Science Advances, 2024), elucidating twilight length sensing mechanisms and their circadian implications (New Phytologist, 2026), and engineering the plant circadian clock for latitudinal adaptation (New Phytologist, 2025). Additional notable works feature a new full-length circular DNA sequencing method for viral genomes and proteome investigations into plant disease resistance, such as Plasmodiophora brassicae in Brassica napus. Mehta received the Carl Douglas Award from the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists in 2023. He is a prominent science communicator, authoring a Nature World View on CRISPR-crops, serving as an Early Career Advisor to eLife, and a bioRxiv affiliate. Mehta advocates for equity, diversity, and inclusion in science, participates in gene editing policy working groups, and contributes to departmental health, safety, and environment initiatives.