A/Prof Sanjay Swarup

Deputy Research Director, Environmental Engineering cluster, SCELSE
Graduate Programme Director, SCELSE
Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, NUS
Director, NUS Environmental Research Institute (NERI), NUS

Email: sanjay@nus.edu.sg

A/Prof Swarup is an agriculture and environmental biologist with a background in field-based themes of plant breeding and plant pathology combined with lab-based training in molecular biology. This background provides a foundation for understanding complex environmental systems and providing meaningful outcomes that can be translated into real life solutions.

A/Prof Swarup heads the Agri-Environmental Systems Biology (AESB) group at NERI, NUS, which investigates the mechanistic basis of ecosystem functioning, especially the role of phytobiomes and microbiomes, from molecular to organismal and landscape scales. His team is unravelling the complex relationships in agro-ecosystems and environmental systems using a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates hydrology, robotics and AI, metagenomics, metabolomics, computational, and high-resolution imaging.

A/Prof Swarup’s research group studies how microbial communities or “microbiomes” and their life on interfaces of solid, liquid or air as “biofilms” drive the processes occurring in natural environments such as surface freshwater or plant surfaces. This includes how microbial species share resources such as metabolites or metabolic signals and have diverse interactions with their hosts and immediate environments, research that is founded on ecological principles.

A/Prof Swarup is the principal investigator for a multi-disciplinary project on improving crop production for green leafy vegetables supported by Competitive Research Programme (CRP) under Singapore’s National Research Foundation. In addition, he has support from other funding agencies for evaluating microbiome potential for alternate protein sources as well developing smart farming solutions for nutritious, high-quality crops.

Research priorities include:

• Crop-specific microbiomes to enhance food and nutritional security
• Agri-plantations-microbiome associations for sustainable systems
• Soil management and practices for regenerative agriculture