Mandar Kulkarni
CEO and Director, Vyas Cancer Research Pvt (VCR Park) (India)
Dr. Kulkarni has acquired life science focused strategic and business development experience, with an emphasis on the oncology domain, over the tenure of his career spanning two decades. After completing his undergraduate degree in genetics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology graduate program at Purdue University in West Lafayette. He was then selected as a T32 NIH fellow for postdoctoral training in the department of Laboratory Medicine at Yale University, where he received additional training in mass spectrometry, x-ray crystallography, and molecular biophysics. He was an executive team member of a seed stage diagnostics start-up in New Haven, where his work was funded by an R43/SBIR from the NIH and recognized with a young investigator award. I was then appointed as the Head of molecular biology and genomics at Sandor Lifesciences and the Chief Technology Officer at Cancer Genetics India, where he managed all operations and led the development of research services, diagnostics, biopharma services, R&D, and genomics-based clinical assays in the area of precision oncology.
Currently, he serves as the CEO of VCR Park and Translational Oncology Council, which is a unique incubator/accelerator to support startups, international collaborative projects, training programs, and clinical research/trials. While he is a senior executive at Lumiseek, a cloud-based collaboration platform, he is also a Co-Founding executive at Biolara, which is focused on equitable access to cancer care.