NewLeaf Appoints Director of Fermentation and Technology Development

NewLeaf Symbiotics, a biotech company commercializing plant health and nutrient technologies that utilize naturally occurring beneficial bacteria, announces the appointment of Sarita Chauhan as the director of fermentation and technology development.
Chauhan joins the company from Decision Alternatives, an agricultural biotechnology consulting company she founded in 2011. She will work at NewLeaf’s St. Louis facility in the Bio Research & Development Growth (BRDG) Park at the Danforth Plant Science Center.
“Sarita brings extensive technical and managerial expertise to NewLeaf Symbiotics,” says Desmond Jimenez, NewLeaf’s vice president of Product Development and Manufacturing. “She has a breadth of experience in the agrochemical industry including microbial genetics and biochemistry, metabolic engineering, bioinformatics, synthetic biology, bio-transformation, and bioprocess development.”
Chauhan brings 25 years of academic and industrial experience to NewLeaf, including 12 years at DuPont and five years on the entrepreneurial side as a director at Algenol Biofuels and Coskata. “We are rapidly advancing our Prescriptive Biologics platform and product pipeline. Sarita is a welcome complement to the team and will accelerate our progress,” says Jimenez.
Chauhan says she is thrilled to join the growing team at NewLeaf.
“I believe that NewLeaf’s PPFM technology is likely to have the same impact for plant health and crop efficiency as probiotics have on human health,” she says.
Chauhan will be leading the effort to develop and scale-up bioprocesses for NewLeaf’s signature PPFM products.