Mahesh Krishnan leads Drug Substance commercialization teams supporting process characterization and technology transfers to advance pipeline vaccines at Merck & Co, Inc. Mahesh has been with Merck for 18 years in technical leadership roles across R&D, Technical Operations and Commercialization, and has led large molecule commercialization and lifecycle management projects across vaccine modalities (microbial, live virus and conjugate vaccines) and biologics. His experience includes process development and characterization of fermentation, cell culture and downstream purification processes leveraging QbD approaches; control strategy development; technology transfer of new and legacy processes; process validation; regulatory submissions; and knowledge management. He received his MS and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and his BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Bombay.