Pradeep Kachroo

Pradeep Kachroo was born in India, where he received his B.S. degree at the University of Delhi in 1987 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Baroda in 1989 and 1995, respectively. A portion of his dissertation research was conducted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, through a graduate fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. He conducted research as a post-doctoral scholar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, and the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. Kachroo joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky in the Department of Plant Pathology in 2002 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2007 and to full professor in 2013.Kachroo studies one of the great enigmas in biology, one that pertains not only to plants and their pathogens, which is his focus, but also to animals, including humans, and their causal agents of disease. Namely, how, in terms of biochemical, genetic, and molecular mechanisms, does an individual cell or a whole organism perceive that it is under attack? What pathways do signals follow to activate responses normally quiescent in the everyday metabolism of a healthy, unprovoked cell? To address these questions, Kachroo has guided his research group through a series of elegant studies that have yielded new insights into plant resistance to infectious diseases caused by a range of microbes and viruses. Their findings have greatly improved our understanding of cellular signaling in response to pathogen attack, thereby enhancing prospects of utilizing both natural and engineered plant resistance to sustainably control plant disease and enhance crop production.