Fund Advisor

Dr. Vipula “Vi” Shukla is an Advisor to Cultivian Sandbox. Vi is currently the Senior Program Officer, Agriculture at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Vi spent more than a decade at Dow AgroSciences, where she helped establish and build their biotechnology research division and led numerous research programs that delivered novel genes, traits and pioneering genome-editing technology for crops. She also held roles in technology investment, licensing and commercialization, collaboration and IP portfolio management. Vi is an inventor on numerous patents and her research has been published in high-profile scientific journals such as Science and Nature.

Vi earned a BS in Biology from Carnegie-Mellon University, a PhD in Plant Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, and completed postdoctoral work at UCSD and the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences.