Dr. Lenka completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa Campus, New Delhi and a recipient of ISCA-National Young Scientist award in Plant Science. He did his Postdoctoral Research on Taxol biosynthetic at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Dr. Lenka is a recipient of Israel Govt. postdoctoral fellowship and conducted a seminal piece of work at Agricultural Research Organization – Govt. of Israel in collaboration with Harvard University, Cambridge, MA on health-promoting metabolites. He worked as team lead and Manager (Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics), Reliance Industries Limited, India (a Fortune Global 500 company), and worked on micro-algae.  Dr. Lenka worked as a research scientist at IMET, Baltimore on algal biotechnology. Dr. Lenka’s current research interest at TDNBC is focused on high-value nutraceuticals, flavor, and biopharmaceuticals using functional genomics and CRISPR mediated high-throughput genome editing and synthetic biology tools from plants.