Gopal Misra is a Postdoctoral Fellow at KAUST with Prof. Jesse Poland in the BESE division since April, 2025. He joined KAUST in August, 2022. His work focuses on plant genomics and population genetics, with a focus on developing salt-tolerant rice varieties using wild relatives of cultivated rice as alternative genetic resources.

He is currently working on the genetic diversity of O. coarctata collected across the coastal region of India. O. coarctata is a wild relative of O. sativa and a potential candidate for developing into a salt-tolerant rice variety through the neodomestication approach. As a computational biologist, he also contributes to the CG-KAUST bioinformatics Hub.