Sezin is the co-founder and advisor of Mori, a Tufts SilkLab spinoff, that focuses on extending the shelf life of food by its edible silk coating. She has built and grew the technical strategy and team from 1 to 60+ and served as VP of R&D and VP of Innovation. She spearheaded the product development and technical relationship management with partners resulting in multiple paid partnerships and pilot programs and resulted in $80M+ funding from the leading agtech and tough tech VC’s. As the ground up co-founder, she has extensive experience on pitch deck and board material preparation as well as due diligence for fundraising and non-dilutive funding applications.
Sezin received professional leadership coaching from David Lee (EVP Samsung Electronics, cofounder of Refactor Capital) and attended multiple workshops on DEI recruitment, employee retention strategies and professional mentoring. She is proud to be the co-founder and leader at Mori, where employee retention rate was over 90% during her leadership.
She has experience on navigating the GRAS FDA approval by convening the panel of technical experts and design of studies and reports. She was instrumental in obtaining GRAS notice on the edible coating which she led multiple meetings working with world renowned technical experts on establishing the safety of the technology for the FDA GRAS panel.
She is also the inventor on multiple patents for silk based edible coating for different applications in food supply chain, packaging and for industry relevant scalable silk production methods. She has extensive experience in IP generation, securing and licensing strategy.
She holds a BS and MS in Chemistry from Bogazici University, Istanbul/TR, a PhD in Biotechnology/Chemistry from Tufts University (a proud Kaplanite -Kaplan lab alumni) and completed her postdoctoral studies at Yale University School of Medicine in Cell Biology.