Biography

Yasser Sobhy Ahmed Nehela, aka Yasser Nehela, was born in Kafr El-Zayat, El-Gharbia, Egypt on January 1st, 1983. In June 2004, he received his B.S. in agricultural sciences with an honors degree (General field) from Faculty of Agriculture, Tanta University, Egypt. Upon graduation, Yasser was appointed as demonstrator/research assistant in the same institution. He obtained his Master of Agricultural Science in Plant Pathology on October 2012 from the Department of Agricultural Botany, Faculty of Agriculture, Tanta University, Egypt where he enjoyed his research time in the lab and field. His M.Sc. thesis entitled “Effect of Some Agricultural Practices on Rice Blast Infection of Some Egyptian Rice Cultivars”.
Early in 2013, Yasser was appointed as an assistant lecturer in the same faculty where he was admitted as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Agricultural Botany, Faculty of Agriculture, Tanta University, Egypt. In 2014, Yasser was awarded a scholarship for two-year through the joint supervision program from the Cultural Affairs and Missions Sector, Ministry of Higher Education, Egypt. He joined the plant-pathogen-vector interactions lab (Killiny lab, CREC, IFAS, UF, Lake Alfred) on March 12th, 2014 as an exchange student/visitor. During this period, he participated on various lab studies, research projects and got more experience in many important techniques, including analytical chemistry techniques (GC-MS, HPLC, and TLC); metabolomic techniques; proteomic techniques; molecular biology (DNA-, RNA extraction, PCR and RT-PCR techniques); electrophoresis techniques and gene expression; experimental designs and statistical analysis.
In May 2016, and based on his competitive application, Yasser has been recruited, and Dr. Nabil Killiny - associate professor, Department of Plant Pathology, CREC-IFAS-UF, accepted him as a Ph.D. student. Officially, he started as a formal Ph.D. student in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Florida in the Summer semester 2016, on May 9th, 2016. The research project of his Ph.D. focused on “The interactions among citrus plants, the bacterial pathogen Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus and its insect vector, Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri at the metabolic level”. Mainly, he used integrative metabolomics and transcriptomics to understand the citrus response(s) against Huanglongbing (aka citrus greening). After a steep learning curve and many failures, over the course of his graduate research, Mr. Nehela ended up publishing more than ten peer-reviewed articles and co-authored several conference abstracts. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Florida in the Fall of 2018. Upon graduation, Dr. Nehela continue to work in Killiny lab as a Post-doctoral research associate to gain more experience in the area of plant-pathogen-vector interactions.