Ajay Kumar Mahato obtained his MSc degree in Bioinformatics from Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut. He joined the ICAR-National Institute of Plant Biotechnology, IARI Pusa, New Delhi as a Research fellow in Dr Tilak Raj Sharma and Dr Nagendra Kumar Singh group (Rice genome) and trained in the area of genomics and bioinformatics. He is the lead bioinformatician from the Indian side in two DBT international genome sequencing projects [International Solanaceae Genome Project (SOL) and International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC)]. He headed the bioinformatics team involved in India’s first endogenously decoded plant genome, “The pigeonpea genome” and other several genomes like jute, mango, coconut etc.

He completed his PhD degree from the Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow. His PhD research focused on the genome-wide identification and characterization of disease resistance and defence response genes in the pigeonpea genome. During his PhD, he developed the first 62K genic high throughput SNP genotyping chip “CcSNPnks”, a single copy gene-based Affymetrix genotyping chip useful for breeders in speeding up the varietal improvement of pigeonpea. In 2019, he joined the National Genomics and Genotyping facility (DBT-NGGF) anchored at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi as a Bioinformatics Research Officer. At DBT-NGGF he actively contributed to establishing a state of the art high computational facility for high throughput automated NGS data processing and storage.

In 2021 Ajay joined the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) as a staff scientist-III. His group will focus research on Bioinformatics, Genomics, Big data analysis, Genomics resource and web application development, Deep Learning, Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in genomics.