Dr. Sunil Chandran is currently Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Development at Amyris. He received a BS in Chemistry from the University of Mumbai, an MS in Organic Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Michigan State University. He worked previously as a Post-Doctoral Research Scholar in the Biochemistry department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and as a Scientist at Kosan Biosciences. Dr. Chandran’s primary interests lie in the field of metabolic engineering for the microbial production of chemicals with a wide range of applications. During his tenure at Amyris, Dr. Chandran led the development of the Automated Strain Engineering pipeline and has overseen multiple research programs at Amyris focused on commercializing various molecules. He also led the DARPA funded Mgs to Kgs program at Amyris to reduce the cost and timeline required to commercialize any new biological target by developing efficient, high-throughput strain optimization pipelines that integrate custom software, robotics, molecular biology, next-generation strain testing platforms, big-data analytics, and machine learning algorithms.
