Welcome, I'm glad you're here. Whether you're a fellow researcher, a founder building something in biotech, or just curious about fungal fermentation, I hope you find something worth a second look. Feel free to reach out.
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Bio-Incubation Manager, FITT IIT Delhi | Fungal Fermentation & Bioprocess Engineering | Research Translation & Tech Commercialization
At a glance
At a glance
6+ years researching fungal fermentation and bio-chemo catalysis
As a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at IIT Delhi's School of Interdisciplinary Research (SIRe), working under Prof. M. Ali Haider, my research asks how fungal physiology can be deliberately engineered, rather than just observed, to produce bio-renewable platform chemicals at scale. Fungi already produce a remarkable range of secondary metabolites naturally; the work is in understanding those biosynthetic pathways well enough to push them toward compounds that are actually useful outside the organism itself.
The core focus is 2-pyrone platform chemicals, particularly 6-pentyl-α-pyrone (6PP), a fungal metabolite with real potential as a bio-based alternative to petrochemical-derived flavor and fragrance compounds. Getting there involves running continuous (CSTR) and shake-flask fermentation to study how growth conditions shape yield, combined with bio-chemo catalysis to bridge biological production with the chemical transformations needed to reach a final platform chemical. Chromatography and spectroscopy do the analytical work throughout, confirming what the fermentation is actually producing, and in what quantity, at each stage.
The bigger aim is contributing to a genuinely bio-based route for these platform chemicals, reducing dependence on petrochemical feedstocks for compounds used across food, fuel, and biopesticide applications.
Run the Bio-Innovation facility and startup evaluation pipeline at FITT BioNEST
As Bio-Incubation Manager at FITT BioNEST (Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer, IIT Delhi), I sit at the operational core of the bio-incubation program, the layer between raw lab capability and a startup actually being able to build on it. I oversee the Bioreactor Facility and its instrumentation, making sure the equipment early-stage biotech ventures depend on is maintained, available, and used correctly, since a facility is only as useful as its uptime and calibration.
On the startup side, I screen incoming deep-tech applications, evaluating the underlying science, technical feasibility, and readiness level of ventures applying to the incubator, and flagging where a promising idea still needs de-risking before it's incubation-ready. This runs alongside day-to-day stakeholder communications: coordinating between founders, facility users, and the broader FITT ecosystem so that technical needs, timelines, and expectations stay aligned across everyone relying on the same shared infrastructure.
It's the applied counterpart to my lab research, the same technical judgment, aimed at ventures instead of experiments.
Molecules & Market is where I connect deep science with startup commercialization, for readers who want to understand not just how a technology works, but whether it can actually survive contact with a market. Each piece takes a real question from bioprocessing or biotech and works through it from both angles: the underlying science, and the economics that decide whether it scales.
Recurring themes include techno-economic analysis (TEA) in bioprocessing, breaking down what it actually costs to take a fermentation process from bench to plant, and where the real cost bottlenecks hide, alongside coverage of emerging biotech breakthroughs, like enzymes and biological mechanisms that challenge textbook assumptions (including a piece on a bacterial enzyme that pushes at the edges of the central dogma). The goal is to make both the science and the business case legible to people sitting on either side of that divide: researchers who want to think commercially, and operators or investors who want to understand the underlying biology well enough to ask good questions.
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