Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-born American-British
structural biologist. After graduating with a degree in physics in 1971, he moved to the United States, where he obtained a PhD in physics in 1976. He then spent two years studying biology as a graduate student while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology, beginning work on
ribosomes as a postgraduate fellow at
Yale University. In 1999, Ramakrishnan's laboratory published a 5.5-
angstrom resolution structure of the
30S subunit of the ribosome. The following year, his laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit and its complexes with several antibiotics. Ramakrishnan was awarded the 2009
Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with
Thomas A. Steitz and
Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". He was elected
President of the Royal Society for a term of five years beginning in 2015. Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the UK
Medical Research Council's
Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the
Cambridge Biomedical Campus.Photograph credit:
Royal Society