Rate My Professor Sambasivam Periyannan

Professor Sambasivam Periyannan serves as Professor of Crop Molecular Genetics in the School of Science, Engineering and Digital Technologies at the University of Southern Queensland's Toowoomba campus. He obtained his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2011. His professional career commenced with a postdoctoral fellowship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) from 2011 to 2016, during which he advanced to the role of independent scientist in 2016. From 2017 to 2019, he held a secondment position at the Australian National University to complete his Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) Fellowship. Upon returning to CSIRO, he led the Crop Resistance Genes team from 2019 to 2021 prior to taking up his current professorship at UniSQ.

Periyannan's research centers on plant molecular genetics and pathology, with particular emphasis on disease resistance mechanisms in cereal crops like wheat and fibre crops. His groundbreaking work includes the identification of the Sr33 gene, an ortholog of barley Mla genes that encodes resistance to wheat stem rust race Ug99 (Science, 2013). He contributed to the development of rapid cloning techniques for disease-resistance genes in plants using mutagenesis and sequence capture (Nature Biotechnology, 2016) and characterized a recently evolved hexose transporter variant that confers resistance to multiple pathogens in wheat (Nature Genetics, 2015). Additional key publications feature the wheat Sr50 gene revealing rich diversity at a cereal disease resistance locus (Nature Plants, 2015), a five-transgene cassette for broad-spectrum rust resistance (Nature Biotechnology, 2021), and an overview of genetic rust resistance from broad to specific mechanisms (PLoS Pathogens, 2017). These contributions have advanced the field of crop improvement through molecular breeding for durable resistance. His research interests encompass crop genetics, breeding, plant disease, biotechnology, and molecular biology, with supervision in agricultural biotechnology, crop and pasture protection, and transgenesis.

Periyannan serves in prominent editorial capacities as Senior Editor for Plant Disease and Associate Editor for BMC Biology and Frontiers in Plant Science. He is honored as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (UK), Board Member of the European and Mediterranean Cereal Rusts Foundation, and Life Member of the International Society for Plant Pathology.