Dr Ravi Sambanthamurthi FRS

Sambanthamurthi’s pioneering research on oil palm biochemistry and genomics has driven sustainability and shaped national and regional policies. As founding Director of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board’s Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Centre, she led the Oil Palm Genome Project, producing the first public reference sequence. Her team identified the SHELL gene, a key yield determinant, and uncovered the epigenetic cause of the MANTLED clonal abnormality. SHELL DNA testing revealed potential land-use efficiency gains of 6.9% in Malaysia and 45.3% in Indonesia, demonstrating its global impact on sustainability and rainforest preservation. She also discovered valuable phenolic bioactives in palm oil mill effluent, a major environmental burden, and developed an extraction process, promoting a circular economy.

Sambanthamurthi received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Oil Palm Innovation, was  honoured as a Knight of the International Order of Merit of Inventors by the International Federation of Inventors, and is an Intel Environment Laureate. An elected Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences (UNESCO) and the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM), she currently chairs ASM’s Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences Discipline.