Venki Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, known as Venki, was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India. Both of his parents were scientists, with his father heading the biochemistry department at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and his mother earning a PhD in psychology from McGill University. After moving to Vadodara at age three, he completed his schooling there, with a brief period in Adelaide, Australia. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1971 on a National Science Talent Scholarship. Immediately after, he moved to the United States, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy in physics from Ohio University in 1976 for research on ferroelectric phase transition.

Ramakrishnan transitioned from theoretical physics to biology, studying as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, from 1976 to 1978, where he researched rhodopsin. He then pursued postdoctoral research at Yale University from 1978 to 1982, focusing on ribosomes with Peter Moore. From 1983 to 1995, he served as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he continued his work on ribosomes, utilizing neutron scattering and X-ray crystallography to elucidate their structure, as well as chromatin and histones. In 1999, he joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, where he had previously been a sabbatical visitor. The following year, his laboratory published significant papers detailing the structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its interactions with antibiotics, providing crucial insights into protein synthesis.

His research culminated in him sharing the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. He continued to make notable contributions, including determining the atomic structure of the whole ribosome in complex with its tRNA and mRNA ligands in 2007. More recently, since 2013, he has employed Cryogenic electron microscopy to investigate eukaryotic and mitochondrial translation. He also served as the President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020. His work has been published in leading scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell, and he authored the book “Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome” (2018).