Ai Oikawa

Ai Oikawa, Ph.D. is the founder and CEO/CSO of AFINGEN® Astalake Biosystems, Inc. and has been developing new plant biotechnology platforms for sustainable food, feed, fiber, and fuel production. Her research has been awarded by Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to improve global food security and environmental sustainability. After receiving a Ph.D. in Agricultural Bioprocess Engineering, she spent a year at Yale University as a visiting scholar for Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) for Biochemistry and Computational System Biology. She also joined the Harvard Business School Agribusiness Executive Program and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) School of Law, Intellectual Property & Technology Transfer Education Program, for Technology Integration and Commercialization.