VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN

 


Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is named one of the 25 Greatest Global Living Indians by NDTV Channel, India on 14 December 2013. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is an Indian-born British-American structural biologist best known for his work on the structure and function of ribosomes, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009. He won this award together with Thomas A. Steitz an American biochemist and Ada E. Yonath an Israeli (lady) Crystallographer "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."

Ramakrishnan was born on 01 April 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India. He studied physics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Ohio University in 1976. After a brief period studying biology at the University of California, San Diego, he began research on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

From 1983 to 1995, Ramakrishnan worked as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1995, he became a professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. In 1999, he moved to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

Ramakrishnan's laboratory made important discoveries about the structure of ribosomes and how they interact with antibiotics. This work helped scientists understand how proteins are made in cells and how some antibiotics work.

From 2015 to 2020, Ramakrishnan served as the President of the Royal Society. During this time, he spoke about issues related to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. He has received many awards and honors for his work, including India's second-highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

Ramakrishnan's sister, Lalita Ramakrishnan, is also a notable scientist. She is a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Cambridge. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition to his work on ribosomes, Ramakrishnan has also made important contributions to understanding how DNA is organized in the nucleus of cells.


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