Biography:

Rajeev Soni did his Master’s in Biotechnology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge, U.K. He has more than 25 years of experience including industry and academia, both nationally and internationally. He has been accredited with the discovery of G1 cyclins in plants during his Ph.D., a discovery that changed the whole course of plant growth and development field. Rajeev’s research has several patents to his credit including the patents on the development of a synthetic nuclease for bioterrorism applications while being at the Naval Research Lab in the USA. He has served as Associate Director, Biotechnology at Ranbaxy, where he was involved in drug discovery in the field of infectious and metabolic diseases. He also had a stint at entrepreneurship where he served as President and COO of PREMAS Biotech, a CRAMS organization for 6 years. Rajeev then joined as an Associate VP in Biocon where he was responsible for the Molecular biology aspects of various projects, in particular being Insulin Glargine. Thereafter, he served as the Head of Protein Engineering at Novozymes, where he researched on the engineering and application of enzymes for various industrial applications. His last assignment was as the Head of R&D and QC at RAS Life Sciences (a Biomerieux Company) in Hyderabad where his focus is on the development of PCR and Real-time PCR based diagnostic kits and cloning and expression of enzymes for research and diagnostic industries. He is currently the Head of Technical Operations at Genei Labs (a Rivaara Company) in Bangalore where he is focusing on development of molecular diagnostic kits as well as molecular biology research reagents and teaching kits for research. His specialization includes drug discovery research in the field of cancer and infectious diseases, molecular diagnostics, industrial biotechnology with a focus on enzyme engineering for various applications, development of protein expression systems in various organisms, fund raising, strategic planning and business development.