Danny Gotarkar was a postdoctoral research associate working with Steven Burgess for the RIPE project at the University of Illinois. Danny's research is focused on engineering crops to adapt to adverse climatic conditions using modern techniques. For RIPE, Danny worked to develop approaches for engineering improved performance of photosynthetic enzymes and analyzing the impact upon the growth of transgenic plants. Danny earned his bachelor's degree in agricultural biotechnology from Dr PDKV Akola and later went on to earn his master's degree in plant biotechnology from UAS GKVK Bengalaru in India. Danny then joined the International Rice Research Institute, Philippines (IRRI) for his PhD in molecular biology and biotechnology, for which he earned a prestigious National Overseas Scholarship from the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment from the Government of India. He was also awarded the Young Scientist award (2016 Montpellier, France) and Best Poster award (2017 Suwon, South Korea) for his PhD research. He completed postdoc work in molecular plant physiology at the Academia Sinica & TARI, Taiwan. His work has been published in Physiologia Plantarum.