Dr. Santanu Dasgupta, Senior Vice-President, Reliance Industries has been appointed as the newest member of the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Future Councils for a one-year term starting from 2020 and ending in 2021. Dr. Dasgupta, the first and only Indian to be included in the newly constituted Global Council for Synthetic Biology, has spent more than 30 years in Biotechnology research in various leadership roles across many Institutes. He has contributed significantly to the discovery of various biotech traits and spearheaded many breakthrough global agriculture biotechnology programs. Dr. Dasgupta is a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Bose Institute, Kolkata, and completed his Post-Doctoral research at the University of Kentucky, USA.
The World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Future Councils is one of the world’s biggest group of multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary knowledge network primarily dedicated to promoting innovative thinking to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable environment for the future. The World Economic Forum’s network brings together more than 1000 of the most knowledgeable leaders from varied academic, government, international organizations, and business fields. These members are then grouped according to their expertise in respective thematic councils. The network is an invite-only community and all its members are exclusively nominated for a period of one year.
The members of the Global Future Council aim to provide strategic insights, scientific evidence, and serve as a guiding light to help understand the major issues that will shape the post-COVID19 world. These include identifying and monitoring the latest trends, scientific research, and frontier technologies with significant potential to transform societies and to contribute their expertise and knowledge to develop initiatives of industry, regional, and solution platforms. They also aim to increase public awareness of the potential benefits and risks related to major scientific breakthroughs in which they are involved.
Dr. Dasgupta is currently a member of the elusive Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology of the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Future Councils. The Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology is a multi-disciplinary body aimed at revolutionizing economies and societies, offering new approaches to transform industries and overcome global challenges. Through new and improved tools, there is an opportunity to revise the future of manufacturing, healthcare, energy production, information storage, environmental remediation, materials, and other areas. The Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology is working on developing a narrative of the ideal future states of synthetic biology and a roadmap to ethically realize those visions.
Dr. Dasgupta is the author of more than 50 papers in several renowned international journals, along with being the inventor of over 70 patents which are recognised worldwide, across various countries in the area of pathogen resistance in plants, drought tolerance, and gene expression, improved algae among several others. An Indian being nominated to such a high position in a world-renowned scientific organisation is an acknowledgment of India’s scientific prowess and breakthroughs over the past years.
