Microbial Engineering for Therapeutics

Dr Mrutyunjay Suar is the CEO of KIIT Technology Business Incubator (KIIT-TBI) and an entrepreneurial professor with PhD in Molecular Microbiology, and trained at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He returned to India and established the School of Biotechnology in 2007 under KIIT University in Bhubaneswar & also established KIIT-TBI, promoting deep tech start-up companies. Under his leadership, KIIT-TBI nurtured more than 250 start-up companies in last 10 years and created 4000+ jobs and established Centre of Excellence in incubation in the area of Digital Health, Diagnostics & Precision agriculture, supported by Department of Sc & Tech, Govt of India. He is a passionate mentor and has been deeply involved mentoring deep-tech startup companies and helped them to take them through their journey from ideation to enterprise creation. He is committed to replicate the successful incubation model in other states of East and North East regions of India, for which BIRAC Regional Centre @KIITTBI was established focusing on Bioentrepreneurship in the East and North East states of India. He also founded two companies and has a very active research group in the area of infection biology and nano-biomaterials and filed 4 patents. He also founded two startup companies working in the area of environment and food biotechnology. He has also established a Women Technology Park (WTP) in his village K Nuagaon, Dist: Ganjam and nurturing five small enterprises run by rural women. He has built several international collaborations (Carleton University, Canada; Technoport, Luxembourg & Start Life Centre, Netherland) to promote cross boarder partnership in the area of innovation and incubation.

Dr. Namrata Misra is presently the Head-Technology Incubation at KIIT Technology Business Incubator, Bhubaneswar which is one of the leading incubators in thecountry and has incubated more than 250 companies so far. She holds a Masters degree from Banaras Hindu University and a Ph.D. in Life Science from Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, ACSIR (CSIR-IMMT), Government of India. She has received Post-Doctoral Fellowship under Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India. At KIIT TBI, she is involved in coordination, implementation and monitoring of various innovative programmes of various ministries like BIRAC, DBT, DST, Meity, Startup Odisha, Startup India and Invest India for technology development from ideation to commercialization. Dr Misra has also been a catalyst in augmenting innovation ecosystem by being an active member of the Technology Enabling Centre at KIIT University, supported by DST and the BIRAC Regional Centre at KIIT TBI focusing on East and North-East states of India and Bhubaneswar City Knowledge Innovation Cluster (BCKIC), supported by PSA, Govt of India. She has delivered more than100 invited lectures in various entrepreneurship development programs across Universities and Institutes in the country. Besides being Head-Technology Incubation at the KIIT TBI, Dr. Misra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, KIIT University. Her research and teaching interests includes study of vital metabolic pathways and in-depth sequence-structural analysis of underpinning enzymes to decipher the molecular mechanism of important biological processes in host. She has authored or coauthored more than 40 peer reviewed international journal publications. She has also developed several cutting-edge computations tools, databases, and web servers which have been widely used by scientific community.

Chandravanu “CV” Dash, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the Center for AIDS Health Disparities Research (CAHDR) and the Department of Biochemistry and Cancer Biology at the Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN, USA. He is a biochemist in training and has been studying viruses for more than two decades. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the National Chemical Laboratory in India and post-doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute HIV Drug Resistance Program (NCI-NIH). He joined Meharry with an NIH K99/R00 grant to start his independent research program focusing on the mechanism of retroviral replication and pathogenesis. His research has been continuously funded by NIH and other funding agencies. He has authored more than 50 peer reviewed publications and regularly serves as a peer reviewer for many journals and NIH grant proposals. He serves as a member of the TN-CFAR executive committee and also served as the co-director of the NIH funded Tennessee Center for AIDS Research (TN-CFAR) Personized Care Scientific Working Group (PC-SWG). In addition, he was a member of the Internal Advisory Committees of the Research Centers in Minority Institution (RCMI) at Meharry and the Meharry Translational Research Center(MeTRC). Recently, he has been appointed to serve as the co-director of the Meharry 2026 Strategic Planning for Research and a member of the Meharry Research Advisory Committee