At University of Minnesota, Dr. Mehra was a recipient of the Doctoral Dissertation fellowship awarded to outstanding final-year PhD candidates. She also received the Best Thesis award at IIT Delhi. She has 6 peer-reviewed articles and more than 15 conference abstracts/presentations to her credit. She has teaching experience to a varied audience including undergraduates, graduates and practicing engineers, and scientists. Some of the courses taught include bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics and modeling and analysis of bioprocesses.

Wei-Shou Hu, Course Contributor

Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science,
University of Minnesota, US

Dr. Hu's research in cell culture technology deals with conventional and macroporous microcarriers, suspension culture, and cell-recycling systems. His recent work in cell culture involves the metabolic control of cell's physiological state and genome wide gene expression analysis of their regulation. He co-authored the textbook Bioseparations. He initiated the Engineering Foundation Conferences on Cell Culture Engineering more than a decade ago which has been among the most important forum of cell culture processing. Recent research activities of Dr. Hu also encompass metabolic engineering of antibiotic producing streptomycetes, and tissue engineering employing stem cells. He developed the cell culture engineering short course offered at the University of MN annually and has brought the course to many companies and countries.

John Aunins
Executive Director, Fermentation and Cell Culture, Vaccine BioProcess R&D, Merck Research Laboratories, Westpoint, PA, US

Dr. Aunins obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1989. He joined the Merck Research Laboratories in 1989 and currently heads Merck’s Fermentation and Cell Culture department, developing manufacturing processes for vaccines and biologicals. He has worked on vaccines for chickenpox, rotavirus, and papillomavirus; he developed the culture process for VAQTA®, Merck's vaccine against Hepatitis A virus, which was presented with the first annual Industrial Biotechnology Award from the American Chemical Society BIOT division. More recently, he has been responsible for managing process development and manufacturing technology transfer for Merck’s HIV-1 vaccine candidate. Dr. Aunins is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and an adjunct Full Professor of the Instituto de Tecnologia Quimica e Biologica/Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal. He also serves on the Conferences Committee of Engineering Conferences International, as well as several ChE departmental advisory & review boards.

Mugdha Gadgil  
Scientist
Cell Culture Development
Invitrogen Corporation
Rockville, MD USA      

Dr. Gadgil oversees Cell Line Development operations for protein production.  She obtained a PhD degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2004, where her research was focused on studying cell's transcriptome response to various environmental stresses. Dr. Gadgil has extensively used the DNA microarray technology to probe changes in bacterial and mammalian transcriptomes to identify targets for metabolic engineering. Her postdoctoral work involved developing a systematic approach for mining microarray data to unveil genetic markers associated with high productivity of antibody producing recombinant cells using novel statistical approaches.  Dr. Gadgil has extensive experience in bringing physiological insights into the analysis of cell culture processing data.  Such analyses are key to successful development of hyper-producing cells and high productivity processes. 

Alois Jungbauer
Professor
Department of Biotechnology
Unversity of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Austria

Professor Jungbauer is a University Lecturer for Protein technology and Downstream processing. His teaching activities at the University, as well as in numerous workshops around the world focus in the area of protein production, isolation and the development for separation of biomolecules. He is currently working in the field of bioengineering of proteins, plasmids and viruses with special focus on expression, downstream processing and characterization of large biomolecules.  Professor Jungbauer has extensive experience on the expression of proteins in yeast, E.coli and mammalian cells. He has developed a multi protein expression/purification system for expression of unknown gene products and subsequent purification in a high throughput mode.  As a proliferate researcher he has more than 140 publications on protein expression and bioseparation, 15 patents and 12 book contributions. He is senior editor of Journal of Biotechnology, and Journal of Biochemical and Biophysical Methods and member of editorial boards from numerous journals in the area of biochemical engineering. 

Gargi Seth
Engineer II
Early Stage Cell Culture Department
Genentech, Inc.
San Francisco, CA USA

 

Dr. Seth graduated from the University of Minnesota’s Chemical Engineering program with a Ph.D. in 2006. She has previously received a Masters degree from the Chemical Engineering program at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. She is currently working in the Early Stage Cell Culture Department at Genentech. At Genentech, Dr. Seth is involved in efforts to better understand cellular pathways involved in protein production processes.

Dr. Seth was among the first to engineer mammalian cells from a global perspective by exploring physiological landscapes. Her work led to the elucidation of the role of epigenetic gene silencing in cholesterol dependence of NS0 cells and many other cell adaptation events. She was also among the first to integrate transcriptome and proteome analyses to comprehend the genetic regulation of hyperproductivity traits of recombinant mammalian cells. She has co-authored 8 scientific papers and has presented at various conferences. As a young bioprocess engineer, she has been actively involved in advocating the applications of genomic and proteomic tools in cell culture bioprocess research. The tutorial that she presented on the transcriptome analysis in Cell Culture Engineering X conference held in Whistler, Canada in April 2006 was very well appreciated. In 2005, Dr. Seth received the W.H. Peterson award for best oral presentation by a student at the ACS-BIOT (American Chemical Society, Division of Biochemical Technology) annual meeting.

Miranda Gek Sim Yap
Executive Director
Bioprocessing Technology Institute
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
&
Professor
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
National University of Singapore

Prof Miranda Yap is the founding Director of BTI, which is the pivotal institution in advancing Singapore’s bioprocessing research and plays a critical role in Singapore’s success in the expansion of biomanufacturing industry. She has been instrumental in nuturing BTI’s growth; transforming it from its nascent days as the Bioprocessing Technology Unit in National University of Singapore to a renowned international institution today. She has trained numerous PhD and master students in many areas of biotechnology. In cell culture technology her work has spanned from early work on cellular physiology to recent transcriptome and proteome analysis for cell engineering. Dr. Yap has also founded two other important biotechnology organizations in Singapore, the Centre for Natural Product Research now called Merlion Pharmaceuticals Pte Ltd, and the Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Technology Centre now known as A-Bio Pharma Pte Ltd. In 2006, Prof Miranda Yap was elected a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering in recognition of her achievements in education, research and professional services in the field of mammalian cell culture.

R.A. Narayanan, Local Coordinador
Director
Customised Technologies (P) Ltd, Bangalore

 

Dr. Narayanan is currently serving as Director at Customised Technologies (P) Ltd., Bangalore, where is in-charge of application software development, and the Bio-instrumentation Division. He has experience in mammalian cell culture, liver toxicology and tissue engineering. Current efforts at Customised Technologies involve Machine Vision-based Automated Systems Development.