Summary

Mr. Madhavan Nambiar specialises in the policy and practice of infrastructure development, innovative emerging industries, and the design and management of government-industry partnership. His 36-year record of public service as an officer of the Indian Administrative Service has seen policy, programme, and regulatory work across key infrastructure and industrial sectors, culminating in in his appointment as Secretary to the Government of India at the Ministry of Civil Aviation. Mr. Nambiar has led major national and State infrastructure programmes. As Secretary, Civil Aviation, Mr. Nambiar directed the design and development of some of India's largest public- private partnership (PPP) projects, formulating core financial and coordination frameworks for Indian airport development. These now constitute the national policy standard, and have been used to develop India's two largest airports. As chairman and managing director of Tamil Nadu's apex industrial development agency, TIDCO, Mr. Nambiar conceptualised and commissioned the State's first public-private toll road project; the State's first information technology (IT) park, TIDEL; and its first biotechnology park, TICEL. Mr. Nambiar has also developed policy ecosystems for innovative, emerging industries. At the Department of Information Technology, he led the formulation of India's first Semiconductor Policy (and its accompanying incentive programmes), and policies for electronics hardware manufacturing; the reworking of national law and regulation to facilitate a growing IT industry; and the establishment of India's first cybersecurity and emergency response agency, CERT-IN. A Fellow at Cambridge University's Judge Business School, Mr. Nambiar has taught public policy at Oxford and Columbia Universities. He holds a master's degree in business administration from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, and a bachelor's degree in economics from Loyola College, Madras University.

Skills

Business

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Dr. Rathan U Kelkar IAS

Secretary, Electronics and Information Technology

Summary

C Balagopal recently retired from Terumo Penpol Ltd., the company he founded 28 years ago, post his 6 years successful stint as Indian Administrative Service officer in states like Manipur and Kerala. Today, Terumo Penpol operates the largest blood bag manufacturing facility in the world. In 2013, he sold his shareholding to Terumo Corp., Japan after a successful partnership with them spanning 14 years. TPL is today respected for the quality of its life saving products which are sold in more than 50 countries across the globe, and dominates the market in India. Balagopal now divides his time between mentoring and investing in startup ventures, especially those engaged in healthcare, community development activities, and writing. Currently he is the Charter Member and first President of TiE Kerala. He also serves on the ethics committee of Rajiv Gandhi Center for Biotechnology. C Balagopal is also mentor to Medical Technology Business Incubator, SCTIMST.

Skills

Business Strategy, Business Development, Team Management, Strategic Planning

Dr Suresh Nair, alumnus of Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay has spent his initial career at R&D Lab of Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India. Later he shifted to NeST, a multi national private industry as Chief Technology Officer. He has designed and developed many novel products and many are finding excellent market acceptance globally. Dr.Suresh is also the founder of Innobreeze Technologies, Biophoton Technologies, companies concentrating on development of bio-photonics based healthcare devices. He is also Advisor/consultant to many other global companies. Dr. Suresh has more than 107 publications, 17 patents, co-authored a book and more than 150 technical reports to his credit. He has been conferred with many awards, the recent one being the prestigious DST Lockheed Martin award 2014 for the top innovation as Rank No.1 in India. He was invited to Silicon Valley and his idea was identified as the one with great commercial potential. He is Chairman of many Government of India committees on R&D, member in various government Steering committees. He is member in many University boards, Fellow IETE, Fellow OSI, Senior member IEEE. He is currently Chairman of IEEE Kochi Subsection. Dr. Suresh is an active promoter of academic industry association, and his passion is to mentor youngsters as entrepreneurs.

Dr. Alex James received his PhD degree in 2 years from the Queensland Micro and Nanotechnology Centre, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia. He works on brain-inspired circuits as well as algorithms and systems. He is actively engaged in research commercialization and startups. He has several years of experience managing industry projects and academic projects in board design and pattern recognition circuits and data and business analytics consulting for IT and semiconductor industry. He is a mentor to several tech startups and co-founded companies in machine learning and computer vision. He has authored several peer-reviewed publications and is a reviewer to international journals and conferences such as IEEE ISCAS, IEEE ICECS, TCAS, TVLSI, TCAD, TCyb, TEC, and TIP. Dr. James has been the founding chair of IEEE Kerala Section Circuits and Systems Society and an Executive Member of IET Vision and Imaging Network. He is a member of IEEE CASS Technical Committee on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems. He was an editorial member of Information Fusion, Elsevier, and is an Associate Editor for HCIS, Springer, IEEE ACCESS, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (2017-18) (Guest associate editor), and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems 1 (2018-present). He is a Senior Member of IEEE, Life Member of ACM, and Senior Fellow of HEA.

P Suresh Babu has more than 30 years of managerial experience in diverse areas. He has served as a Commissioned Officer in the Indian Navy in the engineering branch for 21 years in different capacities and took voluntary retirement as a Commander. After leaving Navy, he worked in the corporate for 2 years. Then he worked in the Lawrence School, Lovedale as the Head of Administration & Finance and worked as the Registrar of Centre for Development Studies before joining Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala as Registrar.

He holds a B.Sc degree from Kerala University,  B.Tech degree from Madras Institute of Technology and MBA.

Anoop P Ambika

Chief Executive Officer, Kerala Start-Up Mission

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Nizamuddin Mohammed is the Chief Executive Office at Maker Village, joining the organisation in 2021. He has over twenty years of global and regional experience in leadership roles covering Entrepreneurship, Business Development, Customer Success, Program Management, Strategy, New Product Development, and Strategic Operations. He spent a significant portion of his professional career at L&T Technology Services Limited, based out of the United States, where he worked with Digital Transformation and Industrial IoT solutions for Fortune 100 companies. He also managed complex global programs spanning across EMEA and Asia. Pursuing his entrepreneurial ambitions, he founded and managed a business advisory in the Middle East advising startups and MSMEs in different stages of their business journey. This experience of working with creative startup entrepreneurs made him a keen believer of Lean Startup Methodology.

At Maker Village, Nizam delights in the opportunity to grow and sustain a vibrant startup ecosystem, collaborating with entrepreneurs, industry, academia, local and global incubator network, R&D organisations, and governmental agencies to create transformational companies. 

He holds an MBA in International Business from the Vlerick Business School, Belgium and an undergrad degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kerala, India.

.Rajeev Kumar C N is the Administrative Officer Cum Purchase Officer at Maker Village. He holds an MBA in HRM and has more than 30 years of experience in handling multi-tasking responsibilities. Before joining Maker Village in June 2019, he accomplished Senior/Middle level Command in Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF, Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India) with history of overseeing Administration, Management, HR, Public Relation, Recruitment, Training, Planning and execution of Organizational Events and Police/Military operations. Strategic planner with demonstrated track record and core strengths in Command as well as persuasive skills in Administration and Human Resource Management. Decorated with numerous awards and recognitions during 28 years of unblemished and relentless service to the Nation before opting for a Voluntary Retirement from Service in September 2018.

.S. Venkat Raghavendar is an Electronics & Instrumentation Engineer by profession and holds MBA degree in Marketing. He has 16+ years of experience in Banking, Engineering, Procurement, and Construction domains. He is currently serving as Manager - Program Implementation at Maker Village.

Before Joining Maker Village, Venkat worked as a Relationship Manager in HSBC & Indus Ind Bank for over 7 years. He was handling Product & Service Portfolios of companies registered under SME/MSME and Start Ups. His expertise includes conducting Project Assessments, Valuations, Evaluation of Strategic Plans, Reviewing and Analysing Financial Data, Identifying Market Trends, Market Analysis, Evaluation of Financial and Performance Reports of Projects of SME/MSME’s.

After his stint in Banking domain, Venkat had worked as a Project Manager in an EPC company headquartered in Middle East. He was involved in Project Conceptualization, construction of Project Portfolios, making new Project Proposals, Project Documentation, Project Bidding, Project Costing and Budgeting, Strategic Planning, Resource Planning and Mobilization and Procurement for various large-scale project of PSU like IOCL, BPCL, HPCL, GAIL, CIAL & Kerala Feeds.

Venkat’s area of interest is in Project Management right from conceptualization to execution of the Project.

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Chithra R, an Electronics and Communication Engineer with experience in teaching and
research. She currently serves the position of Training Manager at Maker Village. She received
Ph.D degree from National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India. She is the recipient of
Erasmus Mundus India-Europe Action-2 HERITAGE Scholarship funded by European Union.
She works on Internet of Things, Sensor Edge Intelligent circuits, hardware realization of
neuromorphic systems and related areas. Before Joining Maker Village, she worked as a faculty
at Amrita School of Engineering, Bangalore Campus and Indian Institute of Information
Technology (IIIT) Vadodara. She also worked with various R&D projects funded by the Grant
Agency of Czech Technical University in Prague during her tenure at Electrolux Lab, Faculty of
Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University. She has published many research articles in
referred journals and conferences and has reviewed articles of several international journals and
conferences such as IEEE TCAS, IEEE Access etc. She is a member of IEEE Circuits and
Systems Society.

Anshad K

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Rajat Nayar studied Engineering at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada and after seven years of working with major Automobile Manufacturers such as Ford Motor Company and Custom Part Manufacturing Companies, has joined Maker Village, Kochi as an Technical Assistant (Mechanical). He spent half a decade working on custom parts that were tailor made to improve an existing mechanical component, as well as closely worked with other designers and engineers to create parts using the most viable and cost effective methods of manufacturing that fit the project requirements.At Maker Village, Rajat drives our Incubatees from an Ideation stage to an initial prototype, kick- starting their component manufacturing with the help of Maker Village's State-Of-The-Art Mechanical Lab and Equipments. An initial production meeting with Rajat at Maker Village provides a clear path to a successfully finished prototype and an accurate estimate of the cost incurred during production, the strengths and weaknesses of the prototype and numerous solutions to hidden challenges in the process of manufacturing that come to light during our In- House manufacturing process, to our Incubatees.

Vipin Babu

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ABCD

Summary

Prof. Rajasree M.S. Professor & Head, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering assumed charge as Director of IIITMK, GoK. Prof. Rajasree has more than 23 years of service in government in several capacities including 10 years as Professor, 3 years as Head of Institution, Asst. Professor, Lecturer and Computer Engineer. Dr. Rajasree was the senior most Professor in Computer Science and Engineering under the Directorate of Technical Education and serves as a member in several committees constituted by the government as a technical expert. In addition a subject expert in selection committees of the Kerala Public Service Commission, and selection committees in several other institutes. Dr. Rajasree has been associated with several National and International conferences and workshops as member of programme committee, session chair, reviewer etc. and delivered expert talks in other engineering colleges on new and emerging topics.

Skills

Software Engineering, Pattern Recognition, Object Oriented Patterns

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Dr. Vinod Gopal

Associate Professor, Amritha Viswa Vidyapeetham

Dr. Alex P James

Professor - IIITMK, Professor-in-Charge - Maker Village, Associate Dean - DUK

Dr. Santosh Kumar MB

Associate Professor, CUSAT, Kochi

Dr. Rajeev Rajan

Associate Professor, Barton Hill, Trivandrum

Prof. Bobby Mathews

Professor & Head Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, ASIET, Ernakulam

Prof. Jose Joseph

Assistant Professor, Digital University Kerala

Paul KI

Principal Engineer, Broadcom

Anish S

Deputy General Manager, CSL

Arun Nair

Executive Director, TiE Kerala