Welcome to the Spore Your Knowledge: Mycelium Deep Dive Webinar Series! Join us for an exciting 2-month-long online event where we will delve deep into the fascinating world of mycelium. Learn all about the amazing properties of this natural material and how it can be used in various use cases, taught by experts from all around the world.
This event is brought to you by Vidacity, an ecosystem for sustainable startups. We work to catalyze change in the environmental sector and hope to do so in this webinar series 🙂
Our webinar series will kick off on Fri Aug 02 2024. Link to the webinar will be sent out 2 days prior to the event.
Speakers (More coming soon!):
- François Audrézet: A marine Biologist & mycoremediation explorer, François completed his PhD at the University of Auckland. He is also the Co-founder at Ecomyko, a start-up that turns plastic waste into valuable products. He is passionate about harnessing fungi magic to tackle plastic waste.
- Dr. Yashaswini Balaraju: She is a Scientist- Entrepreneur; she is an independent consultant and Mentor. In her most recent position, she was the Co-founder of an alt-Protein start-up Mycovation Pte Ltd, Singapore. It is Asia’s first Mycelium-based food-tech company developing novel ingredients for plant-based meat alternatives using fermentation technology. She was responsible for Research, product & process development, and business expansion to other Asian countries. She is currently associated with a Korean Company Mush&, a mushroom cultivation company in Business development and expansion. With a keen interest in sustainability and circular economy, she started exploring opportunities and ideas for a start-up. She has over 15 years of academic and research experience; she also has a PhD in biotechnology with specialization in protein engineering from University of Mysore.
- Dr. Belle Damodara Shenoy: A trained fungal taxonomist, he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in India and completed his PhD at the University of Hong Kong with a thesis on “Multigene phylogeny of selected anamorphic ascomycetes.” His research highlighted the polyphyly of the Sporidesmium complex. He briefly worked as a post-doctoral fellow in Ottawa, Canada, focusing on DNA barcoding of Fusarium. In 2008, Dr. Shenoy joined the Microbial Type Culture Collection at CSIR-IMTECH in Chandigarh, India, where he supervised PhD students and published influential papers on fungal taxonomy and genomics. In 2013, he moved to CSIR-NIO in Goa to research microbial diversity in tarballs. He is currently based at CSIR-NIO Regional Centre in Visakhapatnam. Dr. Shenoy has published 50 papers in renowned international journals and is the Editor-in-Chief of MycoAsia – Journal of Modern Mycology. He has been a member of the International Sub-commission on Colletotrichum taxonomy and serves on the Advisory Board of the Amity Institute of Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences. Outside his scientific work, he enjoys traveling and writing poetry