Dr. T.S. Balganesh is trained as a Medical Microbiologist from Jawaharlal Institute Post-Graducate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Pondicherry and Ph.D from University of Calcutta. He has also awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in 2009.

Possessing more than three decades of experience in antimicrobial drug discovery, Dr Balganesh served as Head of Research at AstraZeneca’s antibacterial drug discovery unit in Bangalore before rising to become the Managing Director and member of the board of AstraZeneca India Pvt. Ltd. Currently, he is holding the position of President and a Director on the board of GangaGen Biotechnologies Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore. He also serves as an advisory member of several national and international grant committees.

Dr. Richard Henderson, is a scientist at the MRC laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, England. He joined MRC in 1973 and was the Director of the center from 1996-2006. He is a pioneer who was involved in developing high resolution electron cryo-microscopy for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018. He has many awards and honors to his credit. He has also been closely associated with India and has helped develop Structural Biology in India.

Dr. Satyajit Mayor is one of the most celebrated biological scientists in India today. He is currently a Professor and Director of the National Center for Biological Sciences. He is a fellow of many academies and societies including a Fellow of the American National Academy of Sciences. He is one of the co-founder of Center for Cellular and Molecular Platforms the first innovation acceleration platform in India. He has been involved in many activities to promote science and scientists in India, including being the founder and active board member of India Bioscience.

Dr K K Narayanan, Founder-Director, Sthayika Seeds and Director-CEO, AgriGenome Labs

KK is an academician turned entrepreneur, who is trained as a plant breeder and molecular biologist. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India, and later on went on to do a post-doctoral stint at the Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University under a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.

Returning to India, he started his career as a scientist at the SPIC Science Foundation, Chennai before moving on to lead the Crop Transformation and Functional Genomics programme at the Monsanto Research Centre at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 2002, he co-founded Metahelix Life Sciences, a Bangalore-based Agbiotech Company that is focused on developing technologies for crop improvement. He was its Managing Director, till it was acquired by Rallis India Limited, a TATA group Company in 2016, by when it was one of the leading Ag-tech companies in the country. He later co-founded and Chaired the Board of Kottaram Agro-Foods, a food technology enterprise which makes packaged food products under the brand name SOULFULL using traditional Indian grains like Ragi. This Company was also recently acquired by TATA Consumer Products Limited.

Narayanan has been a member of several committees and advisory bodies including several Task Forces and Working Groups of the DBT, Government of India. He is a member of the “Vision Group” on Biotechnology set up by the State Government of Karnataka. He has been a member of the Executive Council of the Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises (ABLE), an association of the Indian Biotechnology Industry, and is one of its past-Presidents.

Narayanan is involved with several Government initiatives that promote entrepreneurship and mentors several start-up companies. He is also on Board of several companies engaged in the use of modern technologies for crop and animal improvement. In addition, he is also involved with social and community development projects that leverage agricultural technologies to improve rural incomes and livelihood security.

Dr. Venkatesan is a Physicist. He got his PhD working in Bell Labs and is an academic and entrepreneur. Besides Bell Labs and Bellcore as scientist/ manager, he was a Professor/ Director at Rutgers, Maryland and NUS. He is the inventor of the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process, a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), winner of the Bellcore Award of excellence, George E Pake Prize of the APS. Besides he has published over 780 papers and has 32 patents. He is the founder and chairman of Neocera (since 1989) and is also the co-founder of Blue Wave Semiconductors, Cellivate and Breathonix. He has not forgotten his roots and he and his family are involved in a number of social activities in India.