Venkatesan “Sundar” Sundaresan obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University, for studies of bacterial nitrogen fixation. Following postdoctoral research at University of California-Berkeley, he joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York as a Principal Investigator. In 1996 he became the founding Director of the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology (now Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory) at the National University of Singapore. Since 2001, he has been on the faculty of the University of California at Davis. A major area of his research has been plant reproduction. His laboratory developed “synthetic apomixis” – a technology for producing hybrid seeds inexpensively, making high yielding hybrid crops accessible to smallholder farmers. A second area of research has been the root microbiome, aimed at harnessing beneficial soil microbes for improving crop performance. During his time at U. California-Davis, he has held appointments as Chair of Plant Biology, and additionally as Program Director in the Plant Genome Program of the National Science Foundation. He has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and has been awarded the 2024 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, and the 2025 VinFuture Prize for Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields.