Pushker Ravindra

CEO

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India19 yrs 11 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI Enabled

Key Highlights

Led the most diverse data science team in Asia.
Transformed multiple projects to Agile methodologies.
Championed internal up-skilling and external talent development.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Data Science and Bioinformatics expert in the Agriculture sector.

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Skills

Core Skills

Data ScienceData EngineeringAgile TransformationSoftware DevelopmentBioinformatics

Other Skills

AgileAnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)AutomationBiochemistryBiotechnologyCCatalystComparative GenomicsComputational BiologyData AnalyticsData FluencyDataOpsDatabase ManagementDe novo assembly

About

BTech from IIT Kanpur, PhD from UCD Ireland and EGMP from IIM Bangalore. Total 15+ years of experience (10+ years in leadership) at international R&D organizations across academia, startups, and MNCs. Currently leading Data Science & Engineering team at Bayer, Bangalore and responsible for delivering data science, engineering, and analytics solutions in agriculture. Successfully transformed multiple projects to Agile and implemented DevOps / DataOps. Championed Diversity, Equity & Inclusion by building the most diverse data science team in Asia with people from 10+ states (6 regions), 40% women, 30% Gen Zs, and multidisciplinary skill-set. Passionate about the best practices in data science, internal employee up-skilling, and outreach for external talent development.

Experience

Bayer

4 roles

Short Term Assignment - Vegetables R&D

Oct 2025 – Present · 5 mos

Establishing a network with Vegetable breeders in Asia and potentially other global regions including Europe and the USA, and understanding their pain-points.

Data Science & Engineering Lead

Promoted

Jul 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 8 mos

Leading Data Science & Engineering team, consisting of Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Stewards, Data Managers, Statisticians, Software Developers and Biotech/Bioinformatics domain experts.
Led Data Engineering team to enable data modernization and automated data workflows via data engineering solutions.
Promoting best practices in data science & engineering, internal employee up-skilling, and external talent development via data science outreach.
Leading Data/Digital Fluency, the internal employee up-skilling program where they get trained in latest data science skills.
Led ICS 2022 APAC Digital Team.
Led hiring of trainees from various colleges in Bangalore to build a talent pipeline and beat the attrition.

Data ScienceData EngineeringAnalyticsAgileDevOpsDataOps

Data Analytics Lead

Mar 2017 – Jun 2020 · 3 yrs 3 mos

Data Analytics Lead, Data Scientist, Data Fluency Lead, Project/People Manager, Agile Transformation Lead
Led Data Fluency, the data science up-skilling program for internal employees and mentored 200+ people from IT (R&D, Breeding), Data Science, Digital Foundation, Shared Services and Competitive Intelligence groups.
As an Agile Transformation Lead, successfully transformed multiple projects to Agile - Scrum / Kanban and managed in Jira. Used Xtreme Programming concepts such as Pair Programming, Code review and Unit Testing.
Led implementation of data science best practices such as coding best practices, documentation, packaging, version control and followed DevOps / DataOps to deliver sustainable data products.
Delivered cross-functional data science projects for Yield / Microbial Traits, Biologics, Genomics & Data Science and R&D IT functions across India and USA.
Coordinated internship program for 10+ students from premier institutes (IIT/IIIT/NIT) and mentored 5 students.
Part of team that organizes Data Innovator, a monthly cross-functional Data Science hackathon for collaborative learning and solving regional data challenges.
Introduced Data Science to 1000+ biotechnology postgraduate students in Bangalore to develop external talent.
Received 25+ program, platform, technology / focused / special recognition, iCARE and cross-functional awards.

Data ScienceAgileData AnalyticsData FluencyDevOpsDataOps+1

Data Scientist

Jul 2013 – Mar 2017 · 3 yrs 8 mos

Data Scientist, Computational Biology Scientist, Data Fluency Lead, Project/People Manager, Agile Transformation Lead
Implemented data science best practices such as coding best practices, documentation, packaging, version control and followed DevOps / DataOps to deliver sustainable data products.
Designed and developed robust, relational and normalized databases containing more than 1 billion rows on MySQL / PostgreSQL RDBMS for 10+ data products.
Delivered cross-functional data science projects for Yield / Microbial Traits, Biologics, Genomics & Data Science and R&D IT functions across India and USA.
Led Data Fluency, the data science up-skilling program for internal employees and mentored 100+ people from IT (R&D, Breeding), Data Science, Digital Foundation, Shared Services and Competitive Intelligence groups.
As an Agile Transformation Lead, successfully transformed multiple projects to Agile - Scrum / Kanban and managed in Jira. Used Xtreme Programming concepts such as Pair Programming, Code review and Unit Testing.
Developed an automated microbial risk assessment pipeline for the $300 million BioAg Alliance (a cross-industry collaboration between Monsanto and Novozymes) and automated generation of USDA permit reports.
Introduced Data Science to 500+ biotechnology postgraduate students in Bangalore to develop external talent.
Received 15+ program, platform, technology / focused / special recognition, iCARE and cross-functional awards.

Data ScienceAgileData AnalyticsDevOpsDataOpsAgile Transformation

Genome international

Head of Software Development

Mar 2011 – Mar 2013 · 2 yrs · Chennai, India

Scientist II, Head (Software Development), Project/Reporting Manager at Genome Life Sciences
Head (Software Development) for a web-based next generation sequencing data product, developed using Catalyst framework, handling Illumina GA/HiSeq, Roche 454 and ABI SOLiD platforms.
Supervised design and development of mRNA Sequencing (mRNA-seq), Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS), Exome sequencing (Exome-seq) and Methylome-seq pipelines for all platforms.
Supervised service projects on de novo assembly of carrot genome and transcriptome analysis of zebrafish.
Contributed to writing grant proposals for various grant agencies such as Federal Business Opportunities (FBO).
Contributed to business development activities such as revamping the whole website of Genome (GIC), USA.

Software DevelopmentNext Generation SequencingProject Management

University college dublin

Graduate Student

Apr 2006 – Sep 2010 · 4 yrs 5 mos · Dublin, Ireland

Supervisors: Prof. Denis C. Shields and Dr. Jean-Marc Jacqué
Performed meta-analysis of more than 3,000 HIV-1 nef proteins in 582 subtype B HIV-infected patients from different disease progressions.
Surveyed protein disorder in 80,000 proteins from 2,500 viruses to demonstrate that protein disorder varies very strikingly between and also within viral families.
Investigated the presence of 150 eukaryotic linear motifs (ELMs) in 1,600 eukaryotic viruses to demonstrate that viruses are enriched with short linear motifs.

BioinformaticsMeta-analysisProtein Analysis

Universidad miguel hernández

Research Fellow

Jul 2003 – Mar 2006 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Alicante, Spain

Supervisors: Prof. Francisco Rodríguez-Valera and Dr. Alex Mira
Led Bioinformatics software development for 2 European Commission projects related to Metagenomics - Gemini (Gene mining of metagenomes for novel enzymes and therapeutics) and Miracle (Microbial marine communities diversity: from culture to function) involving more than 10 EU countries.
Worked with multidisciplinary teams of summer interns, Postgraduate or PhD students, Postdocs and Professors from life sciences domain and managed up to 4 projects simultaneously.
Investigated evolution of genome size and architecture of more than 200 bacterial genomes (8 publications).
Designed and developed Micro-Mar: world’s biggest marine microbial biodiversity database along with a few other databases – IWoCS, RISSC and RNAGeneTracer.
Installation, configuration, troubleshooting, administration of Linux, Apache HTTP and MySQL database servers.

BioinformaticsSoftware DevelopmentDatabase Management

Institute of genomics and integrative biology

Research Fellow

Jan 2002 – Jun 2003 · 1 yr 5 mos · Delhi, India

Supervisors: Prof. Samir K. Brahmachari
Part of a team of undergraduate students from IITK invited by Prof. Samir K. Brahmachari (Founding Director, IGIB; Former Director General, CSIR) to be consulted for a few challenging Bioinformatics projects at IGIB.
Team Lead for India’s first commercial Bioinformatics software product by CSIR - PLHoST (Peptide Library Based Homology Search Tool for Functional Annotation), branding by EY and marketed by Jalaja Technologies.
Designed and developed CoPS (Comprehensive Peptide Signature Database) with 12,076 invariant peptide signatures derived from 52 bacterial genomes (Prakash et al., Bioinformatics, 2004).
Designed a software to schedule oligonucleotide synthesis by ABI DNA Synthesizer (ABI 3900) that requires an optimization of each nucleotide to be used for each run of the machine.

BioinformaticsSoftware Development