board of directors
K. K. Narayanan (Managing Director)
Narayanan leads product development and the plant functional genomics and transformation activities of the company. Earlier Narayanan was the Program Lead for Crop Transformation and Functional Genomics at the Monsanto Research Center, Bangalore. Narayanan, a plant molecular biologist and breeder, graduated with a Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University at Coimbatore, India. He later on carried out post-doctoral research at the Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University under a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.
Gautham Nadig (Director)
Gautham is one among the founder members of Metahelix. Gautham heads the business development team at Metahelix. In addition he is involved in driving several efforts in the area of protein modeling. Before joining Metahelix, Gautham was a Senior Scientist in the Bioinformatics division of the Monsanto Research Center, Bangalore and later on served as a consultant to Monsanto's Plant Genomics group at Saint Louis. Gautham is a computational biophysicist who graduated with a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His postdoctoral work at the Department of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University, USA was in the area of computational quantum chemistry
Ravi Krishna (Chief Executive Officer)
Mr. Ravi Krishna is President -Seeds at Metahelix and as CEO of Dhaanya Seeds Private Limited is responsible for growing the seed business and commercializing Metahelix products and technologies. Prior to joining Metahelix, Ravi was with Business Development group in E.I. DuPont India Private Limited, Gurgaon and earlier led the seed business at PHI Seeds Limited, Hyderabad . He had also worked with Advanta India (previously ITC Zeneca Ltd) in different positions before leading the Marketing and Business Development function. In his previous roles, Ravi has been responsible for new business initiatives and brings in considerable experience in marketing and business development. Ravi is a post-graduate in Dairy Technology and a business graduate from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad , INDIA
Nitin Deshmukh (Nominee Director)
Nitin is Head-Private Equity at Kotak Mahindra Bank since June 2004 and is also the Chief Investment Officer of the Kotak SEAF India Growth Fund. He joined the Metahelix as Nominee of Kotak on 2nd June 2005 as additional director and subsequently in the general meeting of the members of the Company on 30th June 2005 as Director. Prior to joining Kotak Nitin was Director-Private Equity with SEAF LLC a Washington DC head-quartered venture fund which joined hands with Kotak for the Kotak SEAF India Growth Fund. Nitin also served as Director-Private Equity with Dresdner Kleinwort Capital. He also served in senior position in ICICI Venture and Cipla.
Nitin holds an MBA degree from Bombay University and a Masters Degree in Pharmaceutical Technology from UDCT, Mumbai.
