Surender Khatodia, Ph.D. leads the scientific and technical operations of the commercial scale cannabis micropropagation at Klonetics for cannabis tissue culture gen zero clones production. He brings over 15 years of extensive experience in plant tissue culture and genomics work on various crops. During the last four years, he has made progressive developments in optimizing the methods of pathogen eradication for clean clone production, genetic testing and germ-plasm conservation of the popular cannabis cultivars. He is coordinating cannabis genomics R&D project with NRC-IRAP and has established a cannabis analytical testing laboratory for cannabinoids, microbial and genetic analysis. His deep passion for plant sciences escalated while working on hairy root cultures of medicinally important plants for enhancing secondary metabolites production. Surender obtained his Ph.D. in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology, for the development of transgenic Bt chickpea plants and went on to teach Biotechnology at University. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Plant Sciences at University of Saskatchewan before starting as a consulting specialist for the cannabis tissue culture and regulatory compliance. His academic background is centered around genetic improvement of plants for sustainable crop production by using biotechnological tools like tissue culture, molecular biology, and genome editing as evident with various scientific publications, co-edited books.
Previous Speaking Engagements at Grow Up:
2023 Alberta
2023 Alberta
