Dr Syahril Abdullah serves as the Director of the Malaysia Genome and Vaccine Institute (MGVI), National Institutes of Biotechnology Malaysia (NIBM), a network-based non-profit research organization under the purview of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation Malaysia (MOSTI). MGVI engages in discovery research in genomics to advance the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of genetics and infectious diseases. Dr Abdullah has worked in numerous academic positions at Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). He holds BSc from Indiana University, MSc in Molecular Microbiology from UPM and DPhil (PhD) in Molecular Medicine from the University of Oxford. His research interests include genetic engineering, gene and stem cell therapy. He is currently overseeing the MyGenome project, an effort to generate a reference genome for the Malaysian population.