I am a bioprocess engineer by training who has evolved multidisciplinary interests. I obtained my B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras and subsequently a PhD in Biochemical Engineering. I was then employed as a postdoctoral fellow for several years at NIH, Bethesda. I have been at IIT Bombay since 2001. I have a research group in the Dept. of Chemical Engineering which focuses on understanding various metabolic and regulatory aspects of microbial systems, towards rationally manipulating their productivity using genetic engineering techniques, for production of therapeutics.

In addition, I have interests in the large scale deployment of education and healthtech technologies. I coordinate development and deployment of Virtual Labs, an MoE ICT project which creates and deploys open source interactive lab education content for engineering and scinece college students (vlabs.iitb.ac.in) and in association with CSIR, we mentor and host content aimed at improving the understanding that high school kids have of current science (jigyasa-csir.in/). On the healthtech front, my group has deployed solutions for cancer screening and pathology. Scale up of such deployment has raised questions of technology assessment and process economics. The bioprocess, health, and education domains also throw up problems of data analysis and I have research interests in data science and communication.

I am also Professor-in-Charge of the Tata Centre for Technology and Design, an interdisciplinary centre with a focus on creating solutions with a high societal impact (www.tatacentre.iitb.ac.in), and have previously served as the coordinator of the Healthcare Research Consortium at IIT Bombay, which interfaces with major hospitals and research labs in the Mumbai area.