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Venki Ramakrishnan
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.
Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.
Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India.
His parents, Prof. C. V. Ramakrishnan and Prof. Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan were both scientists, and his father was head of the department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnan's father was away from India doing postdoctoral research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US. Ramakrishnan's mother obtained a PhD in psychology from McGill University in 1959, completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored, among others, by Donald O. Hebb.
Ramakrishnan has one sibling, his younger sister Lalita Ramakrishnan, who is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the department of medicine, University of Cambridge, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his entire schooling at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for a year and a half (1960–61) which he and his family spent in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1971. At the time, the physics course at Baroda was new, and based in part on the Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Immediately after graduation, he moved to the US, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics from Ohio University in 1976 for research into the ferroelectric phase transition of potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka. Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.
Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University. After his postdoctoral fellowship, he initially could not find a faculty position even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the United States.
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Venki Ramakrishnan
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.
Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.
Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India.
His parents, Prof. C. V. Ramakrishnan and Prof. Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan were both scientists, and his father was head of the department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnan's father was away from India doing postdoctoral research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US. Ramakrishnan's mother obtained a PhD in psychology from McGill University in 1959, completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored, among others, by Donald O. Hebb.
Ramakrishnan has one sibling, his younger sister Lalita Ramakrishnan, who is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the department of medicine, University of Cambridge, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his entire schooling at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for a year and a half (1960–61) which he and his family spent in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1971. At the time, the physics course at Baroda was new, and based in part on the Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Immediately after graduation, he moved to the US, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics from Ohio University in 1976 for research into the ferroelectric phase transition of potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka. Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.
Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University. After his postdoctoral fellowship, he initially could not find a faculty position even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the United States.
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