Balaram Mohapatra: An environmental microbiology enthusiast and currently as Post-doctoral fellow at Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT Bombay. He has received PhD doctorate in the area of Environmental   microbiology and genomics from Department of Biotechnology, IIT Kharagpur. He has research expertise on cutting edge state of the art Geomicrobiology techniques viz. whole genome sequencing, comparative genomics, metagenomics, proteomics, and molecular systematics. During his work,he proposed three novel bacterial species (Rhizobium arsenicireducens, Pseudoxanthomonas arseniciresistens, Achromobacter arsenitransformans) from arsenic-contaminated groundwater of West Bengal, India. He has many international publications of high repute (Plos One, Genomics, BMC Microbiology, Frontiers in Microbiology, Bioresource Technology, etc.). He has received university gold medal in MSc Microbiology (2011) from Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology (OUAT-ICAR), DST-INSPIRE fellowship (2013-2018), Young scientist award at IISF, DST with ICAR NET- 2013, 2014, ICMR-SRF 2013, GATE- 2013, 2014 in Microbiology and Life Science subjects. He has also worked on agricultural management based project at Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI-ICAR), Cuttack, Odisha and has won prestigious national entrepreneurship challenge-2015 by ABLE-DBT for pitching his idea on developing arsenic detection kit. He is life member of many scientific associations viz. international association on hydrological sciences (IAHS), global microbial identifier (GMI), society for human ecology (SHE), We the Microbiologists of India (WTM), Genomics standard consortium (GSC), DCO deep life. In near future, he aims to work on integrated OMICS based insight into geo-microbiology of ecological hotspots and soil-root-plant interface.