ALUMNI OF B.E. BIOTECHNOLOGY PROGRAMME
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Dr. Partho Haldar
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Partho did his bachelor’s in biotechnology in 2006 with his thesis on transcriptomic analysis of drought resistant varieties of rice under the mentorship of Prof. Kunal Mukhopadhyay. Since the reality at Nasik did not match to job profile, which was offered during the campus placements, Partho left the job at Genom Biotech after a week of joining. He came back home and started preparing for further education. He qualified the GATE and also secured a graduate fellowship from the Graduate School of Life Science, University of Würzburg, Germany. Partho pursued his doctoral research on characterizing the targets of mAbs of the Würzburg Hybridoma Library under the mentorship of Prof. Erich Buchner. Thereafter, he got the Max Planck Fellowship to pursue his postdoc under the mentorship of Prof. Reinhard Jahn at MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. Then he started his Habilitation at the Faculty of Biology, to enable a career in the academia. In April 2017 Partho joined CSL Behring as Head of the Test Development Lab in the QC. In August 2019 he took over the responsibility of the GMP-Lab for Water Analytics. Since August 2020 Partho is responsible for the Immunoassay, FACS/SPR & Fermentation labs in department of Research at CSL Behring, Marburg, Germany. |
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Dr. Sreepriya Pramod
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Sreepriya joined the BE Biotechnology program at Birla Institute of Technology in Fall 2003. With encouragement and guidance from faculty of the Biotechnology program, she applied for Ph.D. programs in Plant genetics within United States in 2007. She was accepted into the programs at Dr. Mark E. Welch’s lab at Mississippi State University in 2008 and performed research on microsatellite evolution using sunflowers as a model system for her Ph.D. program. She gained expertise in bioinformatics, population genetics and plant genomics, and also, gained hands on experience in a “Startup” settings. Upon graduation (May 2012), she chose to continue at MSU as a postdoc. She accepted an offer from Eurofins to work on an industry postdoctoral position in Richmond, Virginia where she helped build the organizations capabilities in the area of next generation sequencing, high throughput genotyping and high-performance computing. She was hired as a Senior Scientist with Altria Client Services, Richmond, VA in October 2015. Dr. Pramod is currently a Principal Scientist in the Applied Technologies department at Altria. In her role, she is responsible for the leading and directing the research and development activities in the molecular breeding, plant genomics and bioinformatics, and has active research collaborations with North Carolina State University, University of Kentucky, and Virginia Tech, Fraunhofer IME (Münster) and Profigen do Brasil. She holds 1 US patent and has 13 pending patent applications. She has served as a panelist for the National Science Foundation GRFP area of genetics, genomics and proteomics (2020), and on the AgroPhyto Information Collection task force for CORESTA. She is a Review Editor for Frontiers in Genetics (Plant Genomics), Frontiers in Agronomy (Disease Management), and is on the reviewer board for the journal, Agronomy. |
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Dr. Amit Rai
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Amit Rai is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chiba University. He received his undergraduate training at B.I.T Mesra, India (Biotechnology; Gold Medalist), and achieved an outstanding All India Rank of 31 (99.91 percentile) in GATE 2007 in the life sciences section. Amit completed his Ph.D. training at the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore (Plant secondary metabolism and Systems biology as major). His research interest includes functional genomics for plant natural products using comparative genomics, integrative multi-omics, and systems biology approach. He is particularly interested in exploring the evolutionary basis for the understanding of the origin and expansion of specialized metabolite biosynthesis leading to the plant's huge chemo-diversity. He has been awarded graduate studies scholarship (2008-2012) and Young Scientist award at the National University of Singapore (Nov. 2014), best research poster at The 4th International Conference on Plant Metabolism held in Dalian, China (2017), and best original research by The Japanese Society of Pharmacognosy (2018). |
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Dr. Shreya Agrawal
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Shreya carried out her Bachelor of Engineering in Biotechnology from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, from 2006-2010. Then she joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India from 2010-2012 through the Graduate Aptitude Test Examination (GATE) to obtain her Master of Technology degree in Biotechnology. During this period, she carried out a project on generation of abiotic stress tolerant tomato plants. From 2012-2014, she obtained the Junior Research Fellowship from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India. As a research scholar, she worked on elucidating the role of autophagy in lipid accumulation during nitrogen starvation in model alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. In 2014, she joined the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) program as a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ralph Bock at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Potsdam, Germany. She worked on two key projects. First, molecular farming of high-value metabolites in plants through chloroplast engineering and second, on understanding the role of tRNAGlu in translation and tetrapyrrole biosynthesis. She successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis in September 2018 after which she continued for a year as a post-doctoral researcher in the same group. In 2019, she joined the University of Copenhagen, Denmark as a post-doctoral research fellow. During this postdoc, she studied tRNA biology in bacteria during starvation stress. Currently, she is a plant molecular biology scientist at the Neoplants, Paris, France. |
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Ms. Aprajita Mathur
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After graduating in 2007, Aprajita worked at Accenture for a year, and then pursued her master’s in bioinformatics and Medical Informatics from San Diego State University. In 2009, she joined Illumina, a global leader in the field of genomics where she contributed to 5 patents and a wide range of products like instrument software (MiSeq/NovaSeq), integrated solutions and data analysis pipelines which are used in the fields of agriculture, transplant genomics, forensics and oncology. In 2018, she joined Guardant Health where she leads their Bioinformatics Software Test team, and contributed to the Guardant360 CDx product which is the first FDA-approved liquid biopsy for comprehensive tumor mutation profiling across all solid cancers. I am an International Speaker in the field of Software Testing and will be keynoting at STARWEST 2020 about “It's In Your DNA, or Is It? The Journey of Testing Software for DNA Analysis”. Now she is a Sr. Advisor at IVOW labs, contributing to their “Women in History” data ideation challenge and also leads the “Women Who Test” Bay area chapter. |
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Dr. Prasoon Kumar
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Prasoon did his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) from Birla Institute of Technology, MESRA, Ranchi in the department of Biotechnology from 2004-2008. Thereafter, he pursued Master of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in an area of Bioengineering with specialization in tissue engineering and biomechanics from 2008-2010. Then he worked at Computational Instrumentation division of Central Scientific Instruments Organization (A CSIR lab), Chandigarh from 2010-2011 in an area of biomedical signal and image processing in collaboration with Centre for Dental Education and Research, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Then he pursued joint Ph.D. program at IITB-Monash Research Academy (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia) in the department of Mechanical Engineering with specialization in design engineering from 2011-2018. Then he worked at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to pursue his post-doctoral training in the department of Materials Engineering in an area of Organ-on-chip devices from 2017-2019. Thereafter, he served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Devices at National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research-Ahmadabad from 2019-2020. In June, 2020, he has joined as an Assistant Professor in the department of Biotechnology and Medical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. Apart from academics, I have been actively pursuing entrepreneurship for the last few years. I co-founded Spin Nanofibers Technologies LLP, Indore (2015- present), cofounded Nuovatek Biosolutions Pvt. Ltd., Bhopal (2019- present) and Iota Design and Innovation Labs Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad (2020- present). I have research collaborators to Molecular solution care health LLP, Chennai (2017-present). Please visit my website https://sites.google.com/site/meetprasoonk for more details. |
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Dr. Vimal P. Swarup
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Finishing the B.E. Biotechnology program from BIT Mesra in 2007, I joined an MS program at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. My two-year stint at IIT Chicago was exceptionally successful (3 research fellowships and 4 peer-reviewed papers), helping me secure an admission in the Bioengineering program at the University of Utah (UofU). The university is recognized for its strong focus in entrepreneurship and I had always been interested in the business side of technology. Therefore, while pursuing Ph.D., I undertook multiple internships to explore career options beyond academia: UofU’s Lassonde Entrepreneurship Center, University Venture Fund, and a start-up called Veritract LLC. Expanding my skill set and network helped me get an offer from Navigen, Inc. In January 2014, I started working for Navigen, also an early-stage company, as Manager for Business Analysis. In this role, I was helping the company raise funds, optimize its research pipeline, and explore business development opportunities. In 2018, I joined W.L. Gore & Associates (Gore), a material science company, as a Global Product Specialist for its Structural Heart business. In the past two years, I have been responsible for the commercial success of a portfolio of Cardiac Surgical medical devices in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and SE Asia. |
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Mr. Pulkit Kanodia
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I graduated from BIT in 2014 and the same year I joined Iowa State University in the US to pursue my PhD with a major in Interdepartmental Genetics and Genomics. I spent one year in 4 different labs as a rotation student and worked with C. elegans to study the effect of hypoxia on gene expression, with mouse models to study Parkinson's disease, with Zebrafish to study the onset of and progression of brain tumor and finally with plants to study how plant viruses affect the host gene expression. In 2015, I joined Dr. W. Allen Miller in Plant pathology and microbiology dept. where my goal is to study the transcriptional and translational control of gene expression during virus infection. In 2017, I received Print and Grace Powers Hudson Scholarship in Agriculture for $1000 from College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and in 2019, I received Brown Graduate Fellowship for $10,000 from the office of the Vice President for Research at Iowa State University. |
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Dr. Udita Sanga
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I graduated from the Department of Biotechnology, BIT Mesra in 2007 with a desire to pursue higher education in the field of environmental science. I completed a master’s degree (MS) in Ecology from Utah State University (2008-2010), specializing in behavioural ecology. My subsequent research focused on human-environment interactions, especially in the context of climate change in South and Southeast Asia. I worked in various parts of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Vietnam for four years to understand the impact of climate change on agricultural patterns and food security among smallholder farmers and agriculturists. In 2014, I started a dual degree Ph.D. in Community Sustainability and Environment Science & Policy from Michigan State University. My research focused on an interdisciplinary systems science approach to understanding human decision making under climate uncertainty among farmers in Mali, West Africa. I used participatory role-playing games and system dynamics modelling to assess the past, present, and future resilience of Mali to socio-ecological change. Currently, I am working as a researcher in Stockholm Resilience Center within Stockholm University in Sweden where I am building computational agent-based models that capture cross-scale linkages in integrated agricultural socio-ecological systems. |
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Mr. Kumar Tanmay
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Although I had a PPO from Biocon after college in 2007, I joined TCS instead because I did not see my future in the core operations of Biotechnology. Instead, I wanted to be on the business side of operations. So, I joined a healthcare startup in Oct 2008 within a year of starting my career with TCS. I experienced crazy growth in this startup which sowed the seeds of entrepreneurship in me. I tried but could not succeed in building BumbleBee Rides. It was a pioneer in the self-drive car rentals space in 2013. Bootstrapped and sold HelloMeets in 2016, a platform to meet and learn from like-minded individuals in coding, design, marketing and entrepreneurship. It was profitable from the very first month of operations and continues to grow today. Till date, it continues with the same revenue model of monetising it from community members who derive the maximum value from meetups. Founder of Inkredo since 2017, a data intelligence startup for financial institutions where our algorithms provide actionable insights from banking transactions for credit risk assessment. It's an objective method of risk assessment for companies venturing in unsecured & flow-based capital needs. In addition to India, our product is used by financial institutions in Singapore and Africa too. |
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Dr. Arjun Sasikumar
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After completing my B.E. in Biotechnology in 2007, I joined Rutgers University in New Jersey for my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular biology. My doctoral work was on understanding the requirement for a unique fungal translation elongation factor- eEF3, using yeast as a model system. As fungal infections in immuno-compromised individuals remain a major public health concern, my work indirectly sought to help the development and screening of broad-spectrum anti-fungals targeting eEF3. Graduate school enabled me to develop expertise in yeast genetics and biochemistry as well as a broad understanding of diverse fields ranging from protein crystallography to mammalian genetics. After my graduation, I joined Dr. Rachel Brem’s lab in UC Berkeley as a postdoc, where I worked to develop a systems-level understanding of lifespan extension in yeast. Diet is a key factor determining organismal function and longevity. I found that in yeast, restricting potassium intake acidifies the vacuole, the equivalent of the lysosome, and extends replicative lifespan by a mechanism that requires the vacuolar machinery. As lysosome function is compromised during aging and in many disease states in humans, potassium restriction holds promise as an intervention to promote longevity and health. Currently I am back in India to pursue teaching opportunities. |
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Mr. Amulya Nidhi Shrivastava
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After finishing his BE Biotechnology from BIT Mesra, Amulya moved to Austria for his PhD (2007-2010). He obtained his PhD from Medical University of Vienna where he studied the trafficking of inhibitory GABAA receptors. Following which he worked at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris as a post-doctoral researcher in Neurodegeneration (Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease). His work in Paris focused on studying the dynamics of misfolded fibrillar aggregates on neuronal plasma membrane. Specifically, his work using super-resolution and single particle imaging techniques resulted in a better understanding of the biophysical properties of misfolded proteins on neuronal surface. Along with Antoine Triller and Ronald Melki, he identified several membrane proteins that contribute to the binding and uptake of pathogenic fibrils (amyloid-β, tau and α-Synuclein). Throughout his academic career, he has published several high-impact papers and review articles. In 2019, Amulya joined UCB Pharma, Belgium as a Scientist contributing to various drug-development projects in the field of Neurodegeneration. He is currently based in the Brussels region. |
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Mr. Gudena Krishna
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Krishna is a process system engineering enthusiast who loves to crack tough operational problems using the aid of models and engineering principles. Krishna is currently working as an Advanced Manufacturing Technologies Scientist at GSK and is leading some of the key initiatives under Industry 4.0 initiatives such as Digital Twin, Advanced Process Control and Predictive Maintenance initiatives at GSK, Singapore. One of the key interests of Krishna is to also help identify Industry-Academia gaps and bridge them by facilitating collaborations via Pharma Innovation Programme Singapore (PIPS). Krishna earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering from National University of Singapore (2012) and B.Eng. in Biotechnology from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, India (2008). He then worked as a Technical Consultant at AspenTech for years (and travelled heavily in APAC and MENA region) and then as a Senior Research Fellow Cambridge Advanced Research Labs in Singapore. Krishna has published 6 chemical engineering articles in tier-1 international journals and 6 peer-reviewed conference articles/presentations. In his free time, Krishna likes to hold and facilitate industry seminars for the undergrads/grads to help them become future ready with the desired industry needs. |
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Mr. Prannoy Chowdhury
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I am a proud graduate from the very first batch of B.E. (Biotechnology) at BIT Mesra (Dec 2006). I am indebted to the professors and the staff of BIT who laid a strong all round engineering foundation during my 4 year at BIT campus. From core biotech modules to non-core modules like business management, economics, chemical engineering, software engineering etc. and even sports helped me immensely in my career and developing me as an individual. Before graduating from BIT Mesra, I was at a cross roads of opting either for a carrier in a renowned software engineering company or follow my dream of higher education at Stanford University. Without a doubt I chose Singapore Government’s full scholarship program to do my Masters in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University (U.S.A.) & Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). I was trained in one of the most rigorous program to be a “Water and Environment” sector specialist. After my post-graduation in 2008 as a part of scholarship bond I started working in Singapore’s one of the very well know industrial utility company called Sembcorp Industries. I am working in Sembcorp for ~ 12 years now. I started as a Specialist Engineer (Water Technology) and progressed to Assistant Manager (Business Development & Commercial) for Environmental Sustainability solutions. In my free time I like to do long distance runs (marathons) and explore culture of new countries. |
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Mr. Satya Sinha
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I am currently working in profile of management consulting at KPMG India- Government Advisory as a Manager. I have evolved as a techno-commercial professional starting with my first job after my campus placement from BIT Mesra at Cognizant in 2007 where I was exposed to mainframe technologies, system testing while working on a project for USA based Insurance company post which I joined a full-time MBA in International business from India's premier B School - IIFT Delhi in year 2009 till 2011.I had an opportunity to work in business development profile at Wipro limited courtesy my campus placement from IIFT Delhi. My core responsibility at Wipro was proposal preparation as a pitch or response to RFP. I worked at MPS limited in 2014-15 where I was managing end to end international marketing activities of organization. I transitioned to a role of data driven digital marketing analytics role at IBM India private limited from 2015-2017 where I used multiple tools to trace the entire customer journey and provide insights. I forayed into government advisory at KPMG India in 2018-till date where I have been serving clients of state governments of Bihar, Assam, Ministry of finance, Government of India and DFID, Government of UK across consulting assignments such as digital transformation of state transport corporation, dashboard of tracking progress of India's commitment as signatory to WTO's trade facility. |
