In the early 1920s, the Sugarcane Breeding Station was established in Coimbatore, India, in hopes of creating a sugarcane plant that could grow in India’s environment. For centuries, the country had imported sugar from Southeast Asia and other areas with climates more conducive to sugarcane growth.
After years of crossbreeding plant varieties and experimenting with plant gene expression, one of the station’s researchers, Edavelth Kakkat Janaki Ammal, successfully created a sugarcane plant that could thrive in India.
While Ammal was widely honored and acknowledged for this work, she had already made history, well before her discovery, as the first Indian woman to receive a Doctor of Science degree in botany in the United States.
Born in Kerala, India, in 1897, Ammal developed a fascination with plants at an early age. Her father kept a garden at home and wrote books on his research of bird varieties in northern India.
After earning her bachelor’s degree from Queen Mary’s College in Madras, India, Ammal received the University of Michigan’s Barbour Scholarship in 1924. The scholarship, one of the university’s oldest and most prestigious awards, offered funding to female students from Asia and the Middle East.
Ammal received her master’s degree in botany from U-M in 1925. She returned to India briefly to teach before returning to U-M to study for her doctorate in botany. Her research focused on plant cytology, the study of genetic composition and patterns of gene expression in plants. She specialized in breeding interspecific hybrids.
She joined fellow botany students and faculty members on an excursion to a wildlife area in the north of the state in 1930.
“The whole state of Michigan is full of beautiful freshwater lakes and the university has an excellent station for research near Cheboygan for summer work,” she wrote to her sister Parvathi. “All the classes are in the form of excursions and it’s like one grand picnic.”
Ammal graduated from the program the following year with a doctorate.
Following her time in Michigan, Ammal returned to India to join the Sugarcane Breeding Station. Throughout her career, she taught and researched in India and the United Kingdom. She conducted groundbreaking research, developed several hybrid crop species and advocated for the preservation of India’s native plants.
In 1955, U-M granted her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for her contributions to botany and cytogenetics. Ammal died in 1984 at the age of 87.
— Katie Kelton, The University Record
