Akshaya Thinakaran is a Master’s student in Horticulture with a focus on sustainable vegetable production at Iowa State University. She is interested in working on greenhouses, organic cultivation of horticulture crops, and hydroponics. She is also interested in the weed and pest management in vegetable crops which she believes to have serious effects on the yield.  

Akshaya has completed her Bachelor’s degree in Agriculture at Vellore Institute of Technology, India. Her passion is to help the farming community by reducing their yield losses. Due to her interest in nutrient management, her earlier research projects were in the black gram crop which involves biosynthesized nano-nutrients namely zinc and sulfur to improve the productivity of the crop by overcoming nutrient stress.