Agriculture & Horticulture

Biography

Indu Jaganath in the last 30 years has been attached to the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute. where she started off her research in the field of pollination biology and biodiversity of tropical crops. Her main achievement other than setting up a collection /germplasm of 300 species of medicinal plants at MARDI Serdang was to author a book entitled “The Green Pharmacy of Malaysia”. She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree at in the field of botany at University Malaya and Master of Science from the University of California, Riverside in the field of Plant Science. In 2005, she received her PhD at University of Glasgow in the field of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Her current research is focused on the discovery of chemically and biologically active natural products in tropical plants. She is using metabolomics approach to understand and delineate the metabolic pathways involved in the production of these biologically active compounds. With the incorporation of genomics tools, she is currently focusing on agricultural nutrigenomics, where high throughput screening techniques for the identification and validatation of health benefits of phytonutrients in herbs and fruits has been developed. She was recently awarded the best scientist award in 2014 by her organization.

Research Interest

Agricultural Plant Science, Food Science, Plant Fertilization, Animal and Human Nutrition.