Ashkan Tavakoli is Director of Manufacturing Science and Technology at Alpha Teknova. Ashkan obtained his BSc. in Chemical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology and his MSc. in Chemical Engineering-Biotechnology from Sharif University of Technology, followed by a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Polytechnic Montreal. Dr. Tavakoli has over ten years of experience in manufacturing process design, process development, scale-up and scale-out analyses along with technology transfer within pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors for a wide variety of products including DNA/RNA based nanoparticles, IVD, Cell Culture Media, Buffers, broth, and Molecular Biology Reagents. He is highly skilled in upstream unit operation design and development and has extensive hands-on experience in downstream processes from tangential flow filtration, diafiltration, ultracentrifugation to sterile filtration and lyophilisation. His work has led to multiple peer reviewed scientific and engineering articles and patents over the past more than a decade. Prior to Teknova, Ashkan held positions as Process Development Scientists and Sr. Process Development Scientists at STEMCELL Technologies leading a team of Engineers and Scientists within Process Development. His strong background in product development, characterization, quantification, and process optimization helped industries attaining the next level by upgrading processes and introducing state of the art infrastructure for the next generation of a wide verity of product.