Dr. G. Radhakrishnan
Radhakrishnan is the President in Life Science Advisory Group at Sathguru Management Consultants. He comes with 21 years of seed industry experience specializing in the areas of breeding, trait research and development. He has served Nunhems (Vegetable Seeds business, earlier part of Bayer and now part of BASF) at various global R&D functional leadership, management and strategic roles. He steered, established and managed global R&D teams, platforms and labs in APAC, EMEA and Americas for developing superior and novel hybrids with value added traits and resistance to devastating pathogens and insects for global customers. His expertise is in the crop R&D strategy development and implementation, project management, collaboration, networking, people management and business management systems.
He served as a member & chairman in several BASF Vegetable Seeds steering committees (global integrated breeding projects, global sustainability projects, global IP protection and institutional biosafety committee); served as a member in the ICAR-APSA Joint Working Group; in the Seed Health Experts Committee, Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India; in the APSA R&D Advisory Group; in the Dutch Delegation for Agri-Food Innovation Mission to India 2020 – Climate Smart Agriculture. He was the industry mentor of two Ph.D. students (ICAR-IIHR, Bangalore) who did research under the Prime Minister’s Fellowship Scheme in India.
He has a deep fundamental and applied crop science research knowledge and experience gained from studying M.Sc. and Ph. D. in Plant Pathology specializing in Plant Virology at the premier Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi and as a research intern at AVRDC, Taiwan. He is an avid reader and believes in continuous self-development. He has done executive management courses on strategy, business, leadership and innovation from INSEAD, Harvard Business School, London Business School, Stanford University, MIT and Harvard University.
He is a recipient of several prestigious awards, recognitions and fellowships like ICAR Jawaharlal Nehru Award, Indian Virological Society Young Scientist Award, Prof. M. J. Narasimhan Medal, IARI Merit Medal, Prof. M. J. Narasimhan Academic Merit Award, ASPEE Gold Medal, University Silver Medal, IARI research fellowship, ICAR research fellowship and CSIR research fellowship.