Sambanthamurthi Ravigadevi

Sambanthamurthi was the founding director of the Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Centre at the Malaysian Palm Oil Board. Inducted a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2025, she is also a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia, and currently chairs its biological, agricultural, and environmental sciences discipline group. She led the groundbreaking Oil Palm Genome Project, producing the crop’s first publicly available reference genome, published in Nature. This milestone enabled scientific advances, including discovering the SHELL gene, the most important genetic determinant of oil yield. She also uncovered phenolic bioactive compounds in palm oil mill effluent and developed an innovative process for their extraction that led to the establishment of the first production facility in Mexico. She has published three papers in Nature and one in Nature Communications, and is the holder of over 40 patents. Her accolades include: the Malaysian Invention and Design Society Luminary Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oils and Fats Congress 2022, and the Knight of the International Order of Merit of Inventors, from the International Federation of Inventors' Associations.