Mahender Anumalla

Mahender Anumalla is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the late maturity breeding program of IRRI. His major research focuses on the phenotypic characterization of diverse rice materials to develop elite breeding panels for drought, salinity, and submergence breeding programs.

Mahender did his on-the-job training at IRRI from 2017 to 2019 where he worked on the Green Super Rice project. He also worked in diverse research areas and gained extensive knowledge on various key component traits like nutrient use efficiency, weed competitiveness, early seedling vigor traits for direct seed rice technology, iron deficiency tolerance, low-temperature stress tolerance, arsenic tolerance, low-phosphorus tolerance, and improving nutritional grain quality traits in rice, among others. He mapped the major QTLs for these traits and identified the candidate genes for biotic and abiotic stress conditions.

Before joining IRRI, Mahender worked as a Project Assistant at the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR)-Indian Institute of Rice Research in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Crop Improvement Division (Biotechnology Laboratory) of ICAR-National Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, Odisha, India.

He has been conferred with several awards—Best Researcher Award, InSc Young Researcher Award, Young Achiever Award, Excellence in Research Award, and IRRI Seed Grant—in his short research career. He has published 31 peer-reviewed research and review articles in highly reputed journals, 7 book chapters, and 5 papers in newsletters and protocols. Additionally, Mahender has attended more than 25 international, national conferences, and symposiums; actively participated in more than ten training programs in related statistical and bioinformatics applications for crop improvement; and acted as an editorial member of the International Journal of Agriculture Science and reviewer of various journals.

Mahender earned his BSc in Botany, Zoology, and Chemistry from Sri Arunodaya Degree College, Korutla, Telangana, India and MSc in Biotechnology from Osmania University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He obtained his PhD in Biotechnology at Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar, India through the ICAR-Senior Research Fellowship.