Dr. Poonam Mehra
University of Nottingham
Dr. Poonam Mehra is a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, where she investigates how plant roots sense and adapt to uneven soil moisture at single-cell resolution.
Originally from Uttarakhand in northern India, Poonam completed her PhD at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, where she studied how rice roots respond to nutrient stress. She later received India’s prestigious INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship at the University of Delhi to explore how plant hormones shape root and seed traits.
In 2020, she joined the University of Nottingham as an EMBO Long-Term Fellow and later as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-2024) in the group of Prof. Malcolm Bennett. During this period, she uncovered key cell-scale mechanisms behind local root adaptations such as xerobranching; a response in which roots temporarily suppress lateral root formation when they encounter air gaps in soil. She now uses these adaptations as model systems to reveal how roots sense water at the cellular level.
In 2024, Poonam was awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship and an ERC Starting Grant to investigate how non-genomic mechanisms drive root water sensing and adaptations. Her team develops innovative tools and imaging approaches to understand how roots perceive, respond, and reprogram themselves in in realistic, fluctuating soil water environments.