Faculty Bio

Ajay Shah is an Adjunct Professor at Amrita University and has taught for Amrita University / SUNY Buffalo MBA-MS program since 2011. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Hindu University of America.

Ajay is an entreprenuer working on a new Digital Health startup. He was Executive Director and Head of Research and Early Development IT functions at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) from 2017-2023. BMS is one of the largest bio-pharmaceutical companies, where his group is responsible for partnering with the scientists to provide scientific informatics and IT solutions to facilitate development of new medicine. He is accountable for large capital investment projects, including a single multi-year $100M investment.

Before joining BMS, Ajay was Director of Research Informatics and Research IT at City of Hope National Medical Center (COH) and Beckman Research Institute, where he directed Clinical Research Informatics Core and Translational Research Informatics Core. His team of forty research informatics professionals was also responsible for providing solutions for pre-clinical research.

Prior to COH, Ajay was Director of Research Informatics at Elan Pharmaceuticals in South San Francisco His group was responsible for developing research informatics software and implementing commercial software for Cheminformatics, Bioinformatics, Assay Management, Compound Management, LIMS, etc. The highlight of his work is the unique integrated research informatics platform (RISe) Before Elan, Ajay was Associate Director of Chemistry Informatics and head of Compound Design CoE at Pfizer. Prior to that he held Manager, Rational Drug Design and ChemInformatics support position at Accelrys after starting his career as software developer for small molecule modeling applications.

Ajay received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of Bombay, an MA in Chemistry from the University of Scranton, and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Mississippi. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Arizona and earned an Executive MBA from the University of Arizona.