Prof Tusar Kanti Behera joined ARS scientist in Horticulture on September 1998 at IARI, New Delhi and since then he was working as Sr Scientist and Principal Scientist till April 2021. He was also Professor in the Discipline of Vegetable Science from 2015 to 2021 and looking after the PG students research activities and guided 11 Ph. D and 2 M.Sc. students at P.G School, IARI, New Delhi as major guide. Before joining as Director, ICAR-IIHR, Bengaluru, he served 3 years as Director in ICAR-IIVR, Varanasi.
Dr Behera was also member of Board of Management of Dr YS Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Solan, Himachal Pradesh and member of the Academic Council of Dr YSR Horticultural University, Andhra Pradesh. He has been deputed twice for post-doctoral training at University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA in 2006 and 2014 and also deputed to Australia, France, Russia, Thailand, Libya for different academic assignments.
As researcher his major contribution is on the improvement of several vegetable crops such as cucumber gourds, brinjal, etc. He bred 26 varieties/hybrids in vegetable crops and also registered 6 promising trait specific breeding lines in NBPGR. Few of these varieties were also licensed to Private seed companies. He also worked on marker assisted selection for yield and quality traits and mapped gynoecious gene in cucumber (F/ Locus) and bitter gourd (gy-1) and registered 2 inbred backcross lines (IBLs) of cucumber those were introgressed with gyonoecious trait (F locus) thought marker assisted breeding.
He performed linkage and association analysis in carpel number (Cn) variation in cucumber which revealed CsCLV3 as the candidate gene of the Cn locus. In another study we identified SHORT HYPOCOTYL1 (SH1) in cucumber, which regulates low-dosage UVB (LDUVB) dependent hypocotyl elongation by modulating the UVR8 signaling pathway. Dr Behera and his team developed genomic resources, the first high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly (384.90 Mb size) of M. balsamina was developed using sequence data from 10X Genomics, Nanopore, and Hi-C platforms.
He published more than 125 research papers, 04 edited books, 12 review papers and 15 book chapters in internation repute. Being the faculty member of the P.G. School, ICAR-IARI, he taught several courses and guided 11 Ph. D and 2 M.Sc. students.
Dr Behera is recipient of Fellowships of National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS) (2015); Indian Academy of Horticultural Sciences (2011); Indian Society of Vegetable Science (2017) and Indian Society of Genetic and Plant Breeding (2021).
He received Dr. B.R. Barwale Award for Excellence in PGR in 2022 by Indian Society of Plant Genetic Resources;
Hari Krishna Shastri Memorial Award (2019) by IARI, New Delhi; Dr Kirti Singh Gold medal for Best Researcher in Vegetable Science in 2016 by the Indian Academy of Horticultural Science; Best Teacher Award in Higher Education in 2017 by ICAR-IARI, New Delhi; NAAS-Associate in 2005 by NAAS, New Delhi; DBT-Associate in 2006 by DBT, Govt. of India; Hooker Award in 2010 by ICAR-IARI, New Delhi and Dr Biswajit Chowdhary Memorial Award in 2018 by Indian Society of Vegetable Science, Varanasi.