Gurmeet is a scientist, inventor and innovator with 25 years of experience of working in academia & food industry Research & Development.  He has a strong interest in working on ‘food first’ solutions for health and wellness problems relevant to society & environment sustainability.

Currently he is Professor and Head of Centre for Ayurveda Biology and Holistic Nutrition where he researches end-to-end ‘food first’ sustainable solutions for health and wellness problems relevant to society & environment.   His research spans food analytics, developing functional foods for nutrient deficiencies like iron, metabolic health, and brain health, texturized vegetarian proteins, post-harvest processing for value addition to edible botanicals and creating livelihood generating technologies for social entrepreneurship.

Gurmeet also runs a food and beverage start-up company which focuses on products for ‘goodness’.  He runs a tea club called ‘Infusions of Goodness’.  

Gurmeet has 25 patents filed, 20 publications published, 1 book edited.  He is also keenly interested in teaching and developing curricula for the future and has taught many courses and delivered many workshops over his career.  He has also spent 2-years voluntary teaching science to 7th-grade children in a Kannada medium school on Saturdays.  

Gurmeet won the of Best Teacher Award at Penn State (1997), Best Patent Award Unilever (2005), Unilever Global Compass Award for Innovation (2013), Chairmans Award for Tea Category (2018).  

Gurmeet has a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University USA.  He spent 4 years in academia as a Faculty of Biochemical Engineering at Penn State & IIT Delhi and 20 years in Unilever where he was the global R&D Director for disruptive innovation in his last role.  He was adjunct professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies (2018-19) and continues to be one at Indian Institute of Plantation Management (2018 to present).

Ongoing Projects / Research

RIST Program in Holistic Nutrition

Bosch Program on Personalized Nutrition

Teaching Activities

Teaching Interests:

• Integrative Nutrition, Database & Analytics for Mass Personalization
• Contemporizing Traditional Functional Foods – Idea to Market;
• Unit operations in Ayurveda food processing
• Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives kitchen connects

Selected Publications

Jha, Durgesh K., Dhekne, Pallavee P., Yadav, Geeta U., Patwardhan, Ashwin W. and Singh, Gurmeet ‘Characterisation & evaluation of tea bag papers’, to be submitted to J. Food Sci & Technology.

Raosaheb A. Farakte, Geeta Yadav, Bhushan Joshi, Ashwin W. Patwadhan and Gurmeet Singh Effect of brewing temperature, tea types and particle size on infusion of tea components. Accepted for publication in International Food Research Journal

Yadav, Geet U., Joshi, Bhushan S., Patwardhan, Ashwin W. and Singh, Gurmeet ‘Swelling Kinetics of Tea in Tea Bags’, Journal of Food Science & Technology, 54 (8): 2474-2484, 2017

Raosaheb A. Farakte, Geeta Yadav, Bhushan Joshi, Ashwin W. Patwadhan and Gurmeet Singh ‘Modeling Tea Infusion Kinetics Incorporating Swelling Kinetics’ International Journal of Food Engineering 13(2) 2017

Bhushan S.Joshi, RaosahebA.Farakte, GeetaU.Yadav, AshwinW.Patwardhan, Gurmeet Singh ‘Swelling kinetics of tea in hot water’ J Food Sci Technol 53(1):315–325, 2016

Raosaheb A. Farakte, Geeta Yadav, Bhushan Joshi, Ashwin W. Patwadhan and Gurmeet Singh ‘Role of Particle Size in Tea Infusion Process’, Int. J. Food Eng. 2016; 12(1): 1–16

K. M. Vasantha, Lokesh Basavararaju, Sreeramulu Guttapadu, Gurmeet Singh, T. G. Prasad, ‘Cuticular Wax Content on Tea Leaves: Changes with Leaf Development, Clonal Variations and its Relationship to Cuticular Transpiration’, International Journal of Tea Science, Vol 11, No 3&4 (2015)

Karishma Rajbhar, Himanshu Dawda, Usha Mukandan, Purna Venkatesh, Gurmeet Singh, Sreeramulu Guttapadu and Vilas Sinkar, ‘Polyphenols: Methods of Extraction’, Sci. Revs. Chem. Commun 5(1), 2015, 1-6, 2015

Payal Gupta, Kuldeep Mamtani, Gurmeet Singh, Sreeramulu Guttapadu ‘Thermal inactivation kinetics of polyphenols oxidase from tea’, International Journal of Tea Science, Vol 10, No 3&4 (2014)

Kanani D. M., Nikhade B. P., Balakrishnan P., Singh G. and Pangarkar V. G. ‘Recovery of Valuable Tea Aroma Components by Pervaporation’, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 42 (26), pp 6924–6932, 2003

Mukundan U, Bhagwat V, Singh G and Curtis W R (2001). Integrated recovery of pigments released from red beet hairy roots exposed to acidic medium. Journal of Plant Biochemistry and Biotechnology, 10, 67-69, 2001

Singh, G., “Bioreactor design for plant tissue culture – a simple approach to culturing plant cells at a large-scale” in Proceedings of National Symposium on Bioprocessing and rDNA Technology, Ed. Bihari, V., 1998.

Singh, G., “Elicitation - manipulating and enhancing secondary metabolite production” in Plant Cell and Tissue Culture for Production of Food Ingredients and Additives, Eds. Fu, T. J., Singh, G., Curtis, W. R., Plenum Books, 1998.

Mukundan, U., Bhide, V., Singh, G., Curtis, W. R., ‘pH mediated release of betalains from transformed root cultures of Beta vulgaris L’, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, 50(2), 241-245, 1998.

Awards / Memberships

Gurmeet won the of Best Teacher Award at Penn State (1997), Best Patent Award Unilever (2005), Unilever Global Compass Award for Innovation (2013), Chairmans Award for Tea Category (2018).

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