Loading
Santhosh Chellian has over 20 years of experience in the field of Agricultural Biotechnology. He received his PhD from Madras University working on Plant Functional Genomics. During his PhD he was awarded the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to pursue part of his PhD at CSIRO Plant Industry, Australia. He later joined Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, Singapore currently Temasek Life Sciences Laboratories (TLL), to establish rice genomics program. He further continued his postdoctoral research at University of California, Davis, USA where he worked on various National Science foundation (NSF)and USDA projects. During this time, he developed a collection of gene knockout lines in rice for the global rice research community which are still being utilized by various rice geneticist. His scientific work has been published in several peer reviewed journals and he served on editorial boards of scientific journals. After his academic stint, he joined the industry. He has worked with major Agricultural Biotech companies like Dupont Pioneer, Bayer Crop Science, where he led Biotech research teams and held leadership positions.
For the past six years he has been the Director of Biotechnology at SeedWorks. He is credited with establishing a cutting-edge biotechnology lab in Singapore serving the needs of SeedWorks breeding research and development. He works extensively with the breeding teams to develop strategies and deploy latest genomics approaches to accelerate development of new hybrids with superior genetics. He has successfully established relationships with various public institutions to provide genomics services to support their research and exchange scientific knowledge. He secured a grant from Economic Development Board of Singapore (EDB) to enable his employee to pursue graduate studies in National University of Singapore (NUS). He currently serves on the board of directors of Straits Biotech, Singapore and SeedWorks Philippines.