After completion of doctoral in Plant Physiology at Gujarat University Ahmedabad, I served for ten years (1978-1988) as Lecturer at a post graduate department in Biosciences, Saurashtra University Rajkot (Gujarat). I was teaching Plant Physiology, Biochemistry and embryology. In 1988 I joined Unilever Research Centre, Mumbai and retired from the same organization from Bangalore in 2010.
At Unilever I worked on several different projects like (1) triacontanol based crop specific Plant growth regulators from different crops, (2) Biomarkers for hybrid seeds for cotton sunflower, etc. (3) Potato microtubers using tissue culture, (4) Basmati rice aroma particularly 2,1 acetyl pyroline, developed simple techniques to assess basmati aroma compounds (5) wheat flour for soft chapati and associated glutenin and gliadin proteins which helped selection of wheat from the market (6) consumer preference mapping wheat as well as other poducts, (7) sensory evaluation of different food products like tea, coffee, ice cream, tomato etc. (8) developed FTIR based techniques for tea quality testing (9)Clinical Research.
Last 7 years Research was devoted to medicinal plant extract based products in the field of clinical research for (a) heart health, (b) Immunity and (c) sleep. Directed clinical research as per the ICH-GCP guidlines for the food products fortified with medicinal plants extracts.
Post retirement from Unilever, joined as Director-research projects with Sun-agrigenetics, a tissue culture based company at Baroda, Gujarat. Currently working on projects on micorporpagation of rare medicinal pants as well as plant molecular farming.
