Arjun Khakhar is an assistant professor of biology at Colorado State University.  

His research focuses on plants, which he says are amazing because they make most of the things we need: delicious food, fabrics, building materials, hosts of molecules that make us healthier and happier, and to mention the beautiful biospheres that fill us with wonder and sustain us.  

The biology of plants is filled with intricate mechanisms that let us turn soups of molecules from their environments into complicated structures that can produce all these things. His lab seeks to understand how these mechanisms can be re-engineered to create crops that are more productive, delicious and resilient to the effects of climate change.  

Khakhar uses synthetic biology to study and create new biological systems both in plants and the creatures that interact with them, including viruses and fungi, to achieve these goals.  

He received his bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D at the University of Washington. Khakhar’s research has been published in Plant Physiology, Frontiers in Plant Science, Nature Communications and more.