Nagendra Kumar Singh is an Indian agricultural scientist. He is presently a National Professor Dr. B.P. Pal Chair and JC Bose National Fellow at ICAR-National Institute for Plant Biotechnology, Indian Agriculture Research Institute, New Delhi. He is known for his research in the area of plant genomics, genetics, molecular breeding and biotechnology, particularly for his contribution in the decoding of rice, tomato, wheat, pigeon pea, jute and mango genomes and understanding of wheat seed storage proteins and their effect on wheat quality. He has made significant advances in comparative analysis of rice and wheat genomes and mapping of genes for yield, salt tolerance and basmati quality traits in rice. He is one of the highest cited agricultural scientists from India for the last five years.

He has coordinated several large multi-institutional network projects in the area of plant biotechnology and molecular breeding and has developed more than a dozen climate-resilient varieties of rice tolerant to drought, flooding and salinity for cultivation by the Indian farmers.

Singh has worked worldwide with researchers to improve various traits of crops like rice, wheat, pigeonpea and tomato. He has been a part of many national and international research projects in the area of plant biotechnology and genomics.

In 2011 Singh led a group of 31 scientists from all over India and sequenced the pigeon pea genome, it was first time that the genome of a legume was sequenced. The effort was a totally indigenous effort by scientists from ICAR, NRCPB, Banaras Hindu University, Indian Institute of Pulse Research, UAS Dharwad and PDKV Akola. The First Draft of pigeon pea genome sequence was published in J. Plant Biochem Biotechnol.