In every success story,you find someone who has taken a courageous decision. So believe in yourself and put in your best.
Sachin Surade
B.Pharm- 1999, GATE AIR Rank 07 in 1999
Sachin Surade worked in Ranbaxy before obtaining PhD in Membrane Protein Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt Germany. He then moved to university of Cambridge and worked on a X-ray structure guided small molecule drug discovery program funded by the Gates Foundation and collaborated with several international research groups for TB drug discovery.
Sachin is currently a group leader at Lontas Ltd, a Cambridge based biologics drug discovery company and leading antibody drug discovery projects. He possess a unique experience of leading early stage discovery of small and large molecule drugs.
Pravin Shirode
B.Pharm-1999, M.Pharm-2000, NIPER, Mohali (Bulk Drug), PhD- University of Cambridge. He worked at Astra Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and was a former Director at Sai Life Sciences. He is at present Associate Research Director at Biocon Bristol Myers Squibb Research and Development Center, Banglore, India.
Deepak Singh
B.Pharm - 1999, M.Pharm - Bombay College of Pharmacy 2001, and continued his PhD Tech at BCP, Univ of Mumbai, 2008. He was former group leader at Dr. Reddy’s Lab. He is at present General Manager Corporation, R & D at IPCA Labs.
Mahendra Pawar
B.Pharm 1999. M.Pharm 2001, 5-6 yrs Nicholas Pharma (Mumbai). He is at present Director (Formulation and Development) at - PAR Pharma (USA)
Pravin A. Jagtap
B. Pharm. (Year 2000) M.Sc. (Microbiology)
Drug Inspector, Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of India.
10 Years worked in Pharma/Biopharma Manufacturing in reputed companies, Cipla and Reliance Life Sciences, Mumbai
Joined CDSCO, Central Govt. in 2010 through UPSC
Worked in various Zones of CDSCO for area jurisdictions covering states of Tamilnadu, Kerla, Puducherry, Maharashtra, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and O/o Drugs Controller General India - New Delhi.
Job Profile : Job profile includes Inspection of Pharma/Biopharma manufacturing units for WHO-GMP certification, Clinical Trial Inspections, Ethics Committee Inspections, Inspection for various licensing activities for Biotech / vaccine, medical devices companies. Regulations of Import/Export activities, permissions for Clinical trials, market authorization etc.
Launched various prosecutions in courts through investigations of spurious drugs/not of standard quality drugs, illegal imports or other unlawful activities.
Tushar Mahajan
B.Pharm -2000. Soon after his graduation, he worked as a medical representative at BIOCON for 4 years. He was then associated with ICICI Insurance company for 3 years. He is an entrepreneur now owns a company named- Nevocare Pharma and Hillberry Lifesciences.
Parag Saudagar
B.Pharm-2001, MSc Tech (Bioprocess Technology)- 2003 ICT, PhD Tech(Bioprocess Technology), Mumbai, Post Doc-NY-Polytechnic University, NY USA.
He worked as a senior research scientist at Zytex Biotech Pvt Ltd as R & D Head between 2009-2016. He is at present associated with S.K.BioBiz, Dindori, Nashik as Director since 2016.
Vishal Sonje
B. Pharm – 2007. M. Pharm – 2009 (Formulations development, NIPER, Mohali) GATE AIR Rank 01 in 2007
Presently working in Shantha Biotech (a Sanofi Pasteur company) based at Hyderabad. As a CMC leader for a new vaccine development project, he is accountable for developing and executing a CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing and Control) strategy for end-to-end product development and handover to industrial operations.
Has around 9 years of industrial experience in vaccines, mainly in the domains of R&D,Industrial Operations, Supply Chain Management, Finance, Operational Excellence etc. He has worked as a Project Manager at GSK vaccines in various functions of vaccine division and is a certified PMP (Project Management Professional) and Lean six sigma green belt.
Ketki Belsare
B.Pharm- 2008, M.Pharm-Pharmaceutical BioTechnology, NIPER Mohali 2010.
PhD in Biotechnology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany 2014. Currently a post-doctoral Scholar at Dept of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California, Sanfrancisco.
Rohan Pawar
B.Pharm- 2010, Soon after his B.Pharm, he cleared IELTS and completed his MS (Pharmaceutical Analysis) in Shaffield Hallam University. He came back to India in 2012. Realising the need for training in Sophisticated Instruments for researchers, he started RAP Analytical Research and Training Center, Nashik. He is the owner and Director of the same.
Devidas Vanse
B.Pharm-2013, He worked in a private medical store for two years. His parents worked as labourers at Sahrole village in Nashik District. He stood first in Sales Tax Inspector (STI) examination conducted by MPSC in 2015. He was one among the six students selected from Nashik District. His hard work and self discipline has helped him to overcome the obstacles.
Tapi to Thames: My voyage of persistence and passion for innovation.
As per the Oxford Dictionary “Persistence” means “the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition” and when you are looking for achieving something you are “Passionate” (means Strong and barely controllable emotion) for innovation, you become passion-native.
I do believe I am a very much a passion-native person for knowledge, what fascinated me since from childhood, was the indefinite desire to learn new things, science, technology, despite lots of challenges, many failures I had to go through my voyage from the valley of Tapi river, the region I was born to the voyage of many rivers of India, until I settled in the valley of Thames in the United Kingdom.
My name is Bhushan Bonde, and I am an Oxbridge scholar, having been studied or worked at both, Oxford and Cambridge, this is my story or my journey that like to put forward to you, in the hope that as a reader, you will learn something from my story. I am not sure what I achieved today can be measured as a success or failure in life, for what I believe, we cannot judge our self and define success and failure for our self, and as a reader I let you judge or decide about it.
Life in itself is a journey, and its full of its own challenges, for me the voyage I embarked upon,it’s not even at the finish line, in fact it’s just at the end of its beginning, the phase of life where you complete one juncture and embark on the new venture, I want to tell you the secrets I followed which helped in throughout my career.
Figure 1 Oxford Spires: Oxford, the place where Thames river is so shallow that you can cross by foot, so is the name (Ox: Bull ford: to cross), in early period when there were no bridge, Oxford was the crossing point for farmer who used to travel to London for cattle/bullock-cart/horses market. The University colleges at Oxford were later formed in the early 9th century.
What I want to tell you is the secrets I followed which helped in throughout my career.
First one is “Get rid of your Phobias- the sooner you concur with them, the better you can achieve your goals”. I remember how many of you had experience this, but when I joined my B.Pharm, first year we had Human Anatomy and Physiology practical. In the first or second month, there was a blood cell count experiment and we had to prick our own fingertip, get the 3-4 drop of blood and measure our cell count. I could not prick myself, and then first blood drop I saw, I fainted and almost fell unconscious. That’s the clear example of a phobia, and I was determined to get rid of any of the phobias. I spoke to Dr Shinde, our faculty for subject as asked him what can be done. He gave me advice to visit local butcher, watch the goat’s blood for few days when he cuts then and prepare the meat and I was visiting every day to local butcher at least a month. In effect, just in few days my phobia or fear was gone. So my suggestion for you all, if you really want to get rid of your phobias, talk to others who can guide you, don’t be afraid to reach for help.
Second thing I strongly ask anyone is “identify what you are passionate about”, it can be anything from a sport to art to study. Try to learn and be the best in it. When you learn, learn it technically, learn it for perfection. How many of you remember watching the movie “Three idiots”? Do you remember what Racho said to his two friends? “Excellence is what you should get, success will automatically follow you, so is the money and fame!!!” I suggest you watch that movie 10 times until you realise what I mean.
Next thing you should learn is “Persistence”, believe in yourself and focus on your goal. You may have to sacrifice a lot in your life to achieve that goal, everyone do that, so don’t worry of the result, just be persistent in your work. Keep trying and learn from mistakes with every failure, take a time/stop and lean what went wrong in your attempt.
That leads to next secrete “Don’t be afraid to fail… failure is part of life”, I failed many time. In fact, when I was in MGV final year of B. Pharm, I failed GATE exam, very badly, of the class of 40, almost 25 of my classmate passed GATE with very high ranks, few of them went to NIPER, I did not even score enough to get ranked, it was an absolute failure which I accepted, and it was a tough time in life, however, learn to accept failure was the biggest learning. Was that the end of my career, was there not any other options for me. Absolutely not, there were many opportunities ahead, I could have joined MBA, I could have joined Industry.
And all the options were full of risk, so next secrete in life is “learn to take a risk in life”. In the comic books, even super-heroes (Spiderman/superman) have to take the risk, and remember we are just a common ordinary people. So, if you don’t learn to take the risk early, you won’t be able to achieve your goals. You will have to take ‘a calculated risk’ which means you need understand the best and worst scenario and you need to assess that with your peers, well-wishers and just go for it, sometimes it’s just you who can decide on it.
I have many nostalgic memories of my voyage, as a journey started in a small village, took me to the various river basins in India, Tapi, Godavari, Mithi, Mula-Mutha, Yamuna, Ganga, and finally to the Lee and Thames in United Kingdom.
As per the Indian mythology, you get blessed when you drink the water of the holy rivers, I think I believe one get blessed when you work in those river basin, so make your work as worship, achieve your dreams, and I do believe that “Dreams can come true, if you focus and train yourself mentally and physically to achieve”
Bhushan Bonde
Dr. Bhushan Bonde is the Head of Data Integration at NewMeds IT, UCB. He received Ph.D. in Systems Biology and Mathematical Modelling, with an interdisciplinary background of Computing, informatics, Biology and Mathematical Biology from Brookes University, Oxford (2006).
He also had an interdisciplinary M. Tech in Bioprocess /Chemical Engineering (2001) and Bachelors in Pharmacy (1998) and had been associated with Industry (Ranbaxy R&D, GSK R&D, UCB Pharma), University (Surrey University, Cambridge University) and Government Research Institutes (Sanger Genome Institute, Cambridge, NCL Pune, BARC Mumbai) with more than 20 years of cumulative experience in Computational Biology, Data analytics, Supercomputing.