Keerthi Srinivas, Ph.D.
Senior Director of Bioprocess Development
Keerthi Srinivas received his B.Tech (Bachelor of Technology) degree in Chemical Engineering at Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai India and followed it up with a PhD in Chemical Engineering at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville under the prestigious Walton Foundation-funded Doctoral Academy Fellowship. He has significant experience in several upstream (bioprocess) and downstream (separation/purification) processes with several projects aimed at developing sustainable technological platforms for converting organic feedstocks to biofuels, biochemicals, food and nutraceutical products.
Most recently, Keerthi was a Scientist-II in the fermentation team at Lygos, synthetic biology company located in Berkeley, CA aimed at producing low-cost and high-value biochemicals from corn sugars. As a technical lead in the team focusing on new product innovation, he worked on developing and optimizing aerobic and anaerobic bioprocesses for production of several biochemicals using engineered strains, eventually, taking the processes towards scale-up and commercialization. Apart from process development, he was also involved in developing and optimizing protocols for metabolomics, proteomics, metabolic flux analyses, etc. These protocols were used to identifying and suppress bottlenecks in pathway within the engineered strains.
As a postdoctoral researcher in Washington State University, Tri-Cities, Keerthi served as a technical lead on several projects aimed at converting lignocellulosic biomass to high-value bioproducts. His work led to several publications in peer-reviewed journals and funding from national agencies as well as industries such as Ford, Hyundai, etc. His work focused on bench-scale upstream & downstream process development as well as pilot-scale demonstration of sustainable and cost-effective bio-based processes working directly with research scientists from different parts of the world.
During his graduate studies at University of Arkansas, Keerthi’s research was primarily focused on developing and optimizing high-pressure extraction of high-value nutraceutical compounds from food matrices and in building lab-scale analytical instrumentation to measure physicochemical properties of such thermally-labile components to help in developing efficient technologies. Some of this work extended into a 2-year post-doctoral appointment at University of Arkansas with significant focus on replacing water under high temperature and pressure (or subcritical water) as a “green” industrial solvent.
He has currently published around 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals (with over 1000 citations) and authored around 4 book chapters in food processing and bio-refineries. Since 2017, he is an editorial board member in the International Journal of Energy and Environmental Science and is actively reviewing for several international subscription and open-access journals in the bioprocessing, biorefineries, food processing and antioxidants. He also has significant experience in developing mass & energy balance models, technoeconomic analysis and data science operations.
Keerthi is an avid reader with significant interest in going new places and trying new cuisines. His professional goal is to technically contribute for development of products and processes that could disrupt current world markets.