Neha Potnis is an Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology. Neha earned BS and MS in Microbiology from India and then completed PhD in Xanthomonas effectors and genomics from University of Florida. She later worked as a postdoc in UF on human pathogens (Salmonella) on plants and then another postdoc in USDA-Charleston, US vegetable lab to focus on finding novel sources of resistance in pepper against bacterial diseases. She joined as a faculty in 2016 in Auburn University as a cluster hire in Omics. Her program looks at the molecular basis of plant-pathogen-microbiome-environment interactions, with a focus on seed-borne bacterial pathogens. Her work integrates omics tools to address the fundamentals of plant-pathogen interactions, more specifically, how pathogen adapts to a specific host and to the climatic shifts.