Dr. Mulukutla graduated from the University of Minnesota’s Chemical Engineering program with a Ph.D. in 2012. He has previously received a Bachelor’s degree from the Chemical Engineering program at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He is currently working in the Cell Culture Process Development Department at Pfizer, Inc., where he is involved in efforts to develop newer technologies to improve cell culture process performance, through optimization of cellular metabolism.
Dr. Mulukutla’s graduate work mainly entailed identification of mechanisms that governed metabolic shifts to lactate consumption in late stages of fedbtach cultures, by employing systems biology approaches. Further, his work demonstrated presence of multiplicity of states in glycolytic activity that could explain the metabolic differences typically observed between proliferating and quiescent cells. He received the award for best poster presentation by a student at Cell Culture Engineering XII international conference held in Banff, Canada in April 2010.