After completing my college studies in biology, in 2012, I earned a Bachelor’s in Agriculture with a horticulture major from the University of Sargodha, Pakistan. I received the Chief Minister Merit Scholarship for my bachelor's. In 2014, I obtained a Master’s in Agriculture (horticulture) from PMAS Arid Agricultural University, Rawalpindi, publishing two research articles during that period. For the next three years, I worked as a research associate in industry at a fertilizer-based agricultural company before transitioning to academia permanently. In 2017, I was awarded a PhD grant by the Government of China and joined Prof. Fengzhi Wu's group at Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin which is focused on sustainable crop production through crop diversification. Her group has been investigating the plant-interspecific interaction and plant-microbe interaction mechanisms during crop diversification. I particularly explored the belowground signaling mechanisms that mediate plant-interspecific interaction in the tomato/onion system, alters tomato rhizosphere microbial community composition and improves tomato plant growth and yield. Besides, I collaborated with several group fellows on projects related to intercropping, crop rotation, cover crops, and the use of biochar for integrative crop management. I acquired in-depth knowledge of crop diversification and scientific skills (microbiology: isolation, identification and plant growth promotion assays of microbes, quantitative PCR, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, metabolomics: High-Performance Liquid Chromatography, Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, and soil biochemistry), and learned to set up laboratory, greenhouse and filed experiments, statistical analysis and R programming. During my PhD, I published four first-author research articles and two first-author book chapters. In other activities, I learned the Chinese language (HSK-IV) and won an award at the Chinese Language Speech Competition at my university. After my PhD, I completed different specialized courses including R Programming from Johns Hopkins University, USA, The Climate Science and Action from World Bank Group, USA, Plant Bioinformatics (advanced) from the University of Toronto, Canada, and Introduction to Statistics & Data Analysis in Public Health from Imperial College London, UK. In 2022, my OniTomato project was funded by the European Union under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Program USAL4EXCELLENCE co-funded by Junta de Castilla y León at the Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain. Here, using local cultivars, I am exploring the productive performance of the tomato/onion intercropping system, studying plant-microbe interaction using advanced microscopy techniques, and isolating plant-beneficial bacteria for the development of biofertilizers. I am also learning advanced bioinformatics (e.g., taxonomic and functional profiling tools with QIIM2 and PICRUSt2, respectively, and metatranscriptomics). Besides, I am being trained through a designed set of professional courses as part of my career development plan such as Open Science Open Access, Making Effective Grant Applications, and Course on Transfer of Research Results, and continuous mentoring workshops in regular one-on-one sessions with Dr. Fernando D. Goffman as a mentor. Currently, I have 34 scientific publications (h-index: 14, citations: 655) in well-reputed journals such as Molecular Plant, Trends in Plant Science, New Phytologist, Plant Physiology, and Current Biology. In the future, using both basic and applied research approaches, and combining my current knowledge and skills in crop diversification, microbiology, bioinformatics, and plant ecological interactions, I want to explore the climate resilience of crop diversification and provide farmers with a cost-efficient sustainable crop production strategy in the face of climate change.