OUR TEAM

Head of Regulatory and Government Affairs

Ms. B. Pratyusha Chennupati did a Bachelor of Technology in India and received a Master of Science from McGill University, Canada. She has worked in various roles in the ag industry, including leading product development, registration, and commercial launch. In 2019, she was selected as one of the young leaders to work on frugal solutions for UN SDG’s with UNESCO in Paris. In 2018, she was part of the AdvancingAg Leadership program as a mentee under the mentorship of Hon. Menzies (Former M.P. of Finance – Alberta). Presently, she is a member of the Canadian Agriculture Youth council and a Jury member of the Food Waste Reduction Challenge - Impact Canada.

Head of Microbiology and Agriculture

Dr. Johnny Sena is an experienced researcher with a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado Anschutz medical campus, where he studied epigenetics, transcription, and alternative splicing of hypoxia-regulated genes and their roles in cancer. His expertise includes intimate understanding of the research process, especially molecular biology that is fundamental to the core development of Pebble Labs’ Directed Biotics technology. Dr. Sena previously served as the NGS Laboratory Coordinator at the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), where he managed NGS projects on Illumina, Pacbio, and Oxford Nanopore platforms with organisms ranging from microbes to various plants and animals for collaborators in industry and academia. Concurrently, he served as a Bioinformatics Research Associate at NCGR where he performed numerous RNA and DNA-Seq bioinformatics analyses. While at NCGR, Dr. Sena studied the role of exosomes and outer membrane vesicles in plant and endophyte symbiosis.

Head of Computational Biology

Kelly Schilling received her Master of Science degree in Pharmacology/Toxicology from the University of. California, Davis and her bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin. Ms. Schilling has more than a decade of experience working in bioinformatics and computational biology. Prior to joining Pebble Labs, Kelly worked as a Bioinformatics Research Associate at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she did customized bioinformatics. analyses and pipeline development, including genome/transcriptome assembly, variant detection, genome-wide association studies, structural and functional annotation, transgene characterization, and CRISPR target design. Kelly currently leads the Computational Biology Team at Pebble Labs in a number of tasks, including the development of custom bioinformatics workflows for analysis of large-scale next-generation sequencing datasets, in silico microbe characterization and screening, and design and optimization of RNA molecules to activate RNA interference defense mechanisms in host crops. These analyses are key to Pebble Labs’ platform science, including selection of microbes as well as RNA molecule delivery.