Associate Professor Sunita Ramesh

Dr Sunita Ramesh completed her PhD at the University of Adelaide, investigating the ‘Molecular Mechanisms of Zinc Uptake and Regulation in Cereals’. Upon completion of her PhD in August 2002, Dr Ramesh took up a position as a post-doctoral researcher in the Plant Research Centre at the Waite Campus, University of Adelaide. She continued her research into improving abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants such as wheat, barley, chickpea with a strong focus on the role of membrane transport proteins and associated signalling cascades. In 2015, Dr Ramesh was the lead researcher involved in identifying that gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) – an inhibitory neurotransmitter in mammalian brains, is a stress signal in planta; and that a family of anion channel proteins have a putative GABA binding motif. Her reserach involves studying the role of GABA in reducing cell death in grape berries.

In 2017, Dr Ramesh started teaching part time at the School of Biomedicine at the University of Adelaide, while continuing her plant focussed research. Whilst at the School of Biomedicine, Dr Ramesh started research into the roles of ion channels and transporters in cell motility in cancer, with a particularly strong focus on brain cancer. Currently Dr Ramesh’s research focuses on identifying novel natural compounds and their modes of action in limiting tumour cell movement.

Dr Ramesh joined Flinders University as a Lecturer in Molecular biology in 2020 and established Transport Physiology and Signalling research group. Her laboratory uses several heterologous expression systems such as Xenopus oocytes, E. coli, yeast, tobacco cells, plants, and cell lines to answer research questions. Her research group focusses on investigating plant-soil-microbe interactions and the role of plant exudates to improve abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Her group also researches into identifying novel natural pharmacological compounds to limit brain cancer invasiveness.