Strand Life Sciences

Anand Janakiraman, known in the office as ‘Janaki’, joined Strand in 2002 and has been a part of the journey of Strand ever since. He has been a part of the start-up enthusiasm of Strand, building products at a frenetic pace to meet aggressive deadlines. He has been involved in a variety of activities of Strand from software development to business development, marketing and strategy.

He received his B. Tech and M. Tech degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT, Bombay.

Shanmukh Katragadda joined Strand in 2010. He currently heads the clinical bioinformatics team responsible for the validation of the clinical assays, and the analysis of the NGS data from the various clinical panels. Prior to this, he was involved in the development of Strand NGS, a tool for the analysis and management of NGS data, used by many researchers across the world in various universities and medical research institutes.

Prior to joining Strand, Shanmukh worked at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development India on applied research projects in automotive safety and telematics. He has three patents to his credit in the areas of passive sensing for road surface condition detection and protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks.

Shanmukh obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering from JNTU College of Engineering, Kakinada, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Hyderabad, and a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

Radhakrishna Bettadapura, or RK, is Senior Director, Business Development, at Strand Life Sciences. RK holds a Ph.D in Computational Biology and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and his background is in engineering, computer graphics, and computational biology. RK started at Strand as a software engineer, writing specialized software for fast DNA variant analysis. In his current role, he heads BD for the research informatics division, and is responsible for increasing Strand’s business footprint in the United States.

Dr. Bahadur joined Strand in 2013 as Director of Medical Genetics and overlooks Strand’s somatic cancer testing portfolio. She also leads the experienced team of scientists who build and maintain the knowledge base at the heart of Strand’s cancer genomic tests.

She has extensive experience in the fields of metabolic disorders and cancer biology through her work at Connexios Life Sciences, the New York University School of Medicine, and the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Dr. Bahadur earned her Ph.D in Biological Sciences from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

Dr. Ashraf Mannan joined Strand in 2013 and overlooks the interpretation of NGS-based panel test data for clinical samples and preparation of the molecular genetics reports (so far over 3000 reports) sent out to physicians. He has over 13 years of experience in Molecular Genetics, gained through his work as Principal Investigator in the University Medical Centre of Göttingen (UMG) in Germany and by currently working in Strand Life Sciences, India.

Dr. Mannan earned his Ph.D [summa cum laude (best thesis award)] in Human Genetics at the University of Göttingen, Germany and Habilitation (PD) (highest academic qualification for a scholar in Germany) in Molecular Human Genetics at the University Medical Center of Göttingen (UMG), Germany and completed his Masters from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He was also a member of the Cluster of Excellence EXC 171 “CNMPB”, commonly referred as “elite institution” in Germany. For his outstanding contribution in the field of hereditary disorders, he was awarded the Tom Wahlig Foundation Prize (2005).

Dr Prabhakar has been working with Strand since 2001. He has been working on various software products developed in Strand, from managing development teams to overseeing product support. He has also been solely responsible for the computation infrastructure at Strand right from inception until 2019.

In 2008, he started a small group within Strand to work on Biodiversity Informatics, building a collaborative and participative platform to document every species in India. Today, this open source, open data platform is one of the largest databases of biodiversity in India. Since 2017 he has been on the executive committee of the Taxonomic Database Working Group, the international group that develops standards for biodiversity information.

Prabhakar has a B.Tech and MS from IIT, Madras and a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Abdul is Vice President of Software and Engineering at Strand. Abdul started his career as a developer working on databases and enterprise applications. Later on he played several roles from Consulting, Support, Sales and then back again in Engineering, leading the re-architecture of solutions for one of the largest enterprise SaaS companies in the world. Abdul has strong expertise in algorithms, computational performance, infrastructure, devops, functional programming languages and strongly believe in the notion of end to end automated systems and processes. Abdul is B.Tech Computer Science from NIT Calicut and an MBA from IESE Barcelona with multi-national and multicultural experience working in India, US, Spain and Singapore.

Abdul has given keynote lectures at various events covering engineering, automation, infrastructure, IaaS, cloud computing etc. as keynote speakers at events including Gartner’s IODC, Manufacturing summit, Wipro’s global delivery leaders meets etc. He has also a published author at Etcio.com and cxotoday.com.

Dr. Rajan Verma is a senior pathologist with 20 years of experience specialising in surgical pathology, oncopathology, and blood banking. He has a wide-ranging experience in all fields of pathology, having run multiple large laboratories and blood banks across Delhi – NCR. He is a certified quality auditor with a great commitment to quality and maintenance in laboratory procedures and reporting.

Dr. Nivedita Jayaram has 16 years of experience in the field of biochemistry. She has 7 years of experience working and heading a laboratory in the Middle East and worked in the UK for 4 years. Her special interest lies in serum and Hb electrophoresis, clinical endocrinology, therapeutic drug monitoring, foetal and maternal screening, inborn errors of metabolism and in the field of oncology. Dr. Nivedita has experience in setting up referral laboratories based on of lean laboratory and six sigma concepts, as well as in equipment procurement, validation and expanding a test menu.

Dr. Nivedita has been a member of the hospital infection control committee and has been Administrative Officer of Hospital Welfare in England for 4 years. She is a trained assessor and has faced CAP and NABL audits independently and successfully. With several publications in Indian journals to her name, she has also been awarded the Certificate of Achievement as a finalist in Lab Improvement and Innovation and as awarded Runner up and Certificate of Excellence in the Quality Fables competition by Qual Tech Prize 2017 by Qimpro. She has conducted several CMEs for technical staff and doctors.

Dr. Shubhada Apoorva Kanhere has more than 25 years of experience in anatomic pathology from various national and international institutes. She received her MD (Pathology) from BJMC Pune. She has worked in CMC Vellore, Adyar Cancer Institute and Apollo Hospitals. She was the former head and senior consultant in Apollo Hospitals. She has completed her fellowship in anatomic pathology and cytopathology from Path Center, University of Western Australia in Perth and has also worked in Royal Liverpool University Hospital, UK as a consultant in histopathology.

Pooja joined Strand in 2013 with 14 years of research experience in cancer biology, stem cell biology and aging and is now part of the team that oversees the Strand clinical diagnostic operations. Prior to this, Pooja worked in Strand’s translational clinical research team that designed and validated next-generation sequencing assays for Strand’s diagnostic offerings.

She obtained her Ph.D from Brown University, Rhode Island, in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry and pursued her postdoctoral training at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, California.

Dr. Veena R, consultant pathologist with over 17 years of experience in various fields of pathology – surgical pathology, oncopathology, immunohistochemistry, and flow cytometry. Her keen interest area is surgical oncopathology – head and neck, uro-oncopathology, GIT and female genital tract pathology. She has been an impaneled NABL assessor for the last 5 years and has conducted over 45 NABL assessments. She has been the head of a large referral laboratory for over 10 years with administrative management, instrumental in setting up satellite labs in the hub and spoke model. She has participated in several clinical trials and has published eight case reports and three review articles in various national and international journals.

Dr. Mithua Ghosh is the Director, R&D and Head of Department of Molecular and Clinical Genomics at Triesta Sciences is an accomplished cancer biologist with over 18 years of academic and corporate experiences in fields of cancer biology and genomics, molecular pathology, translational research, and stem cell research. After her Ph. D, she pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at Wright State University, Dayton, USA on the role of various oncogenes involving the p53 pathway. A gold medallist in her post graduate, she also received the ‘Biomedical Excellence Award’ during her postdoctoral fellowship for her diligent research and published multiple peer reviewed articles. Her research skills were further honed at British Columbia Cancer Research, Terry Fox Laboratory, Vancouver where she studied the role of cancer stem cells in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.

Dr. Mithua Ghosh has led in setting up the unit for cancer genomics, liquid biopsy, and molecular diagnostics for cancer detection at Triesta. She has established the state-of-the-art laboratory of cancer genomics and molecular diagnostics (together supporting genomic medicine). She has published peer-reviewed articles, attended and chaired several national and international conferences and workshops. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee and Institutional Ethics and Research Board overseeing cancer research at HCG. She also serves as a member of several biomarker advisory boards.

Vinay Paramasivan joined Strand in 2013. He is responsible for driving business volume and profitability as well as global marketing of StrandNGS. Vinay also oversees the GeneSpring renewal business. Vinay has over 15 years of experience in managing Sales, Marketing, Distribution, Business Development, Key Account Management, and Technical Support and over 6 years experience in Talent Acquisition, Operations & Project Management through his revenue generation roles at multi-nationals like ManpowerGroup, Kodak and Godrej.

He has a Post Graduate Diploma in International Business and completed a Mechanical Engineering degree at the Government Engineering College, Thrissur, University of Calicut.

Dr. Kintan J Sanghvi is a senior registrar with 4 years of experience in the field of Surgical Pathology and Cytopathology. After pursuing a degree of MD Pathology, he underwent training in Oncopathology at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, from where he also has done Fellowship in Cytopathology. He has an authorship of around 6 articles in national and international journals and has also given a lectured in a national conference.

Dr. Masum Bhavsar is the chief pathologist and haematopathologist in Ahmedabad. He received his MD (Pathology) from BJMC Ahmadabad. He has undergone special training in haematopathology at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai and has undertaken molecular pathology workshop at Tata Memorial Centre, Kolkata. He is a certified NABL internal auditor and his main areas of interest are haematopathology, leukemia work up, flow cytometry, molecular pathology and laboratory accreditation and management.

Dr. Cantor serves as the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Sequenom Inc. Dr. Cantor was previously the chairman and professor of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biophysics and Director of the Centre for Advanced Biotechnology at Boston university. Prior to this, Dr. Cantor held positions at Columbia university. He was also Director of the Human Genome Centre project of the Dept of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley laboratory. Dr. Cantor is a consultant to more than 16 biotech firms and has published more than 325 peer reviewed articles, has been granted 26 US patents, and co-authored a three-volume textbook on Biophysical Chemistry. He recently completed the first textbook on Genomics: “The Science and Technology of the Human Genome Project.

Sandeep Tyagi is the Chairman of Estee Advisors. He is responsible for setting the firm’s direction, sustaining a winning culture and developing profitable investment strategies. Estee group of companies runs arbitrage funds and does market making activities in emerging markets around the world.

Prior to Estee Advisors, Mr. Tyagi was the CEO of Inductis, a consulting and analytics outsourcing firm that he founded in 2000. The firm served several of the largest financial services companies of the world including asset management, credit card, insurance and lending companies in the areas of investment optimization, target marketing and risk management. In July 2006, Inductis was merged with EXL Service, a NASDAQ listed public company.

Prior to founding Inductis, he was a partner at the Mitchell Madison Group (MMG), an eminent global strategy consulting firm, where he led the Analytics and Ecommerce Practice area.

Mr. Tyagi is a Board Member of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Excellence Foundation and a Charter Member of TiE. He is also a Board Member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), Delhi Chapter. He has received numerous awards including 40 under 40 for New Jersey and the Distinguished Alumni Service Award from IIT Delhi.

Mr. Tyagi holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a B-Tech in Computer Science from IIT, Delhi. He also holds a Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF). He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.

Dr. Vijay Chandru co-founded Strand in 2000 with Dr. Ramesh Hariharan as a spin-off from the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He is an academic entrepreneur recognized as a ‘Technology Pioneer’ by the World Economic Forum in 2006. His academic career has spanned over two decades at Purdue University and IISc.

Dr. Chandru is the recipient of several awards and honors: Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (1996), MCIT Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in IT (2001), UGC Hari Om Trust award for “Science and Society” (2003), the President’s Medal of INFORMS in 2006, distinguished Alumni award by the MIT India Program in 2007, and was recognized as the Biospectrum Biotech Entrepreneur of 2007.

Dr. Chandru was the elected Honorary President (2009-2012) of the Association of Biotech Led Enterprises (ABLE), the apex trade body that represents the Indian biotech industry. Dr. Chandru also serves as an advisor to the Karnataka State Council on Science & Technology and on the Atal Innovation Mission at the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI AAYOG) in New Delhi. He holds a Ph.D from MIT.

Dr. Ramesh Hariharan is the co-founder and CEO at Strand, and adjunct professor at the Computer Science department of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. At Strand, over the last 15 years, Dr. Ramesh has lead teams building analytical tools for high-throughput molecular profiling; these tools are widely used and have been cited in several thousand publications. More recently, Dr. Ramesh and the team at Strand have been working on technology to make DNA sequencing for genetic disease diagnosis affordable in India. Dr. Ramesh’s research contributions in computer science include fast algorithms for several algorithmic problems. Dr. Ramesh is a recipient of the TR100 Award of Young Innovators by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine and in 2003 received the Global Indus Technovator Award from MIT, instituted to recognize the Top 20 Indian Technology Innovators worldwide.

Dr. Ramesh received his B. Tech from the IIT, Delhi, his Ph. D from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and subsequently did a postdoc at the Max-Planck Institut fur Informatik in Saarbrucken, Germany.

Dr. Ramesh was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. IIT, Delhi recognized him as the Distinguished Alumnus for the year 2015.

Dr. V. Vinay is a founder and Chairman of LimberLink Technologies. Prior to this he was the Group Chief Technologist for Geodesic Ltd. He has co-founded two successful startups, PicoPeta Simputer and Strand Life Sciences. PicoPeta was acquired by Geodesic in 2006.

Vinay was a professor at the India Institute of Science for over a decade from 1995 to 2005. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI). He has a wide range of interests in mathematical aspects of computer science, especially in Complexity Theory, Algorithms, and Data Mining.

Vinay is a recipient of the prestigious Sir C.V. Raman Award by the government of Karnataka for Excellence in Engineering Research in 2001. He is a winner of the Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Informatics for his role in developing the Simputer. He currently serves as a President of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS).

Swamy Manohar is a founder and Managing Director of LimberLink Technologies. Prior to this, he was a co-founder and CEO of PicoPeta Simputers Pvt. Ltd which was acquired by Geodesic in FY 2006, where he served as the Chief IPR & Strategy Officer. After obtaining his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University he was a professor at the University of North Carolina for two years and then at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, from 1990 to 2005. While at IISc, he co-invented the Simputer, was awarded the first Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in IT, and pioneered the faculty entrepreneurship activity at IISc, which has since catalyzed similar activity in IITs and other educational institutes in India. He co-founded Strand Life Sciences® (formerly Strand Genomics), and String Labs, the first academic incubating company in India. Swamy Manohar has contributed to research in Computer graphics, visualization, virtual reality and CAD for rapid prototyping.