Harshita Mangal

Harshita Mangal

PhD Student

Harshita Mangal from India is a PhD student in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture. Her research focuses on dissecting complex traits in Sorghum bicolor, with a primary focus on flowering time regulation and nitrogen use efficiency. She works at the intersection of field-based phenotyping, genomics, and computational biology, integrating resequencing data, RNA-seq, and multi-environment field trials. Harshita has led genome-wide (GWAS) and transcriptome-wide (TWAS) association studies to uncover genetic signals underlying key agronomic traits. She is currently working on modeling phenotypic plasticity, identifying regulatory networks through co-expression analysis, and validating SNP datasets for genotype accuracy across large populations.

In the News

  • Students fly the lab's first UAV timepoint

    Our lab has worked with UAV data for almost a decade—building code, training and evaluating models, answering questions, and publishing papers—but we depended on collaborators and contractors to fly our fields. Until now. We collected our first timepoint—of many—for 4,500 research plots outside Lincoln, Nebraska. Our students flew. Thank you to Biquan Zhao (our teacher), Zhongjie Ji (our UAV data expert), and Jinliang Yang (who trusted us with his now-irreplaceable UAV), and congratulations to the lab’s four newly FAA-licensed UAV pilots: Karla Cuéllar, Harshita Mangal, Anuradha Choudhary, and Ryleigh Kirby. Special thanks also to Pascal Izere for outstanding collaboration over the years.

  • Harshita Mangal receives 2026 PSI Heuermann Award

    Congratulations to Harshita Mangal on being named the recipient of the 2026 PSI Heuermann Award.

  • Harshita's PhD Candidacy

    Congratulations to Harshita Mangal on advancing to PhD candidacy. This milestone reflects her dedication and progress toward completing her doctoral research.

  • Schnable Lab at Corn Breeding Research Meeting

    Harshita Mangal, Waqar Ali, Karla Cuéllar, and Zhongjie Ji presented at the Corn Breeding Research meeting.

  • Nebraska Corn outreach

    Jensina, Sofiya, and Harshita had the chance to meet with members of the Nebraska Corn Growers Association and talk about their work on lab projects related to crop breeding, optimizing nitrogen use, and using artificial intelligence to study leaf diseases in new ways.

  • UNL-Bayer Hackathon

    Ryleigh Kirby, Harshita Mangal, Sofiya Arora, Jensina Davis, Hadiya Kounsar, Ozgur Altundas, Amany Gomaa, and Karla Cuéllar joined the Bayer Agriculture Data Hackathon, where Sofiya’s team won first place, Hadiya and Ryleigh’s team took second, Jensina’s team placed third, and Ozgur’s team earned the social engagement award.

Recent Publications

  • Mangal H, Mahboub S, Shomo ZD, Ullagaddi C, Biney EE, Turkus J, Linders K, Tonido CB, Sugita K, Obata T, Schnable JC, Roston RL, Harmon FG (2026) An RNA-seq data resource for time-of-day-dependent cold responses in sorghum and foxtail millet. BMC Research Notes Research Square doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9620448/v1 Accepted
  • Mangal H, Linders K, Turkus J, Shrestha N, Long B, Kuang X, Cebert E, Torres-Rodriguez JV, Schnable JC (2025) Genes and pathways determining flowering time variation in temperate adapted sorghum. The Plant Journal doi: 10.1111/tpj.70250 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.12.12.628249
  • Shrestha N, Mangal H, Torres-Rodriguez JV, Tross MC, Lopez-Corona L, Linders K, Sun G, Mural RV, Schnable JC (2025) Off-the-shelf image analysis models outperform human visual assessment in identifying genes controlling seed color variation in sorghum. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.70013 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.07.22.604683