Nikhil Bhamwani — HTBAA Fall 2026
About me
I am an engineer in the Founders’ Office at Lemnisca in Bengaluru, India, where we are working on how synthetic biology companies approach scale-up — combining machine learning models with a scale-down to scale-up approach. The role is less a title than a function: show up wherever the highest-leverage problem is, and solve it with whatever discipline fits.
The route here was not a straight line. At BITS Pilani I took an integrated dual degree — an M.Sc. in Biological Sciences alongside a B.E. in Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering. The biology half gave me real bench time: hands-on exposure to the instruments and methods of a synthetic biology lab, and to some of the downstream steps. I then spent close to three years as a full-stack software engineer at Societe Generale, building and maintaining compliance applications used by the bank’s regulatory teams — Spring Boot microservices, REST endpoints, CI/CD pipelines, and the observability stack wrapped around them.
Two different worlds, but the question underneath both turned out to be the same one: how do you take something novel and meaningful, and make it usable at scale? Along the way there were detours I am glad I took — a quant analyst stint building market-data pipelines and back-testing scripts, an early engineering internship at a microbiome-testing company, and a few years at BITS helping run the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, co-creating a makerspace inside the library, and organizing a 48-hour hackathon that turned several classmates into founders.
Why I am here
We have limited resources on this planet, and any technology that genuinely creates abundance becomes something humanity can flourish on. I think bioengineering has that scope, and I think we are still at the tip of the iceberg. That is the bet I want to spend my twenties on.
Concretely, I am here for two things: the self-driving lab — how high-throughput automated experimentation can make innovation faster and more reliable — and the discipline of designing for manufacture from the very first experiment. On automation I will be honest: I am close to a novice, and I am working through Industry 4.0 and ISA-95 to catch up. Coming from the software side, I am used to shipping to production at scale; I want to learn what that sentence means when the thing being shipped is alive.
Current final-project direction: a living pH homeostat — an engineered auxiliary microbe that senses sustained pH excursions inside a fermentation and damps them from within the culture.
Experimenting → Building → Learning. Still in the loop.
Contact info
Homework, Labs, and Projects
See the nav bar on the left to look through my work for How To Biomanufacture Almost Anything (Fall 2026)!