Dr. Pushplata Singh obtained her Master’s and PhD degrees in Genetics from the Dept. of Genetics, University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi in the year 2001 and 2006 respectively. The title of her Ph.D. thesis is “Molecular genetics correlates of Diabetic Chronic renal insufficiency” and using extensive wet lab biotechnology tools along with bio-informatics and bio-statistics expertise established the genes conferring risk to the disease in Indian population. She has 10 years of research experience in the field of Computational Genomics and Molecular Genetics. After completing her PhD she wrote an independent project titled “ Genetic determinants of Alcohol dependence” and was awarded an independent ICMR-Research Associate fellowship for two years at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. In 2009 she was selected as a Research Scientist in a DBT-Centre of Excellence project entitled “Genome wide association study (GWAS) in Rheumatoid Arthritis and Ulcerative Colitis”. The Centre of Excellence project on GWAS was first of its kind in India involved partners from different fields such as Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Physics, Medicine and Biotechnology. Her principle responsibility was to execute the project by under taking Whole Genome based genetic analysis using Bio-informatics and bio-statistics tools. Besides, she was also assigned the key task of successful co-ordination of project by bridging up the gaps between multiple disciplines.
In her tenure in TERI, Dr. Pushplata has successfully established a Bioinformatics unit and is continuously involved in training students on various computational tools for Genomics and Proteomics. Two of her PhD students are working on the Whole Genome Sequence data analysis of Bio-control and AMF fungi and the group has published 2 research articles from their Computational Genomics work in high impact factor journals (BMC-Genomics and BMC-Evolutionary Biology).