Profile: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Indian-American Nobel Laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, known to most as 'Venki', was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu.



He later migrated to the US to continue his studies where he later got settled and attained US citizenship.

In 1976, Ramakrishnan earned his Ph D in Physics from Ohio University in the US.

He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego. He, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.

He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.

During his tenure, Ramakrishnan was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

In 1995, he moved to the University of Utah to become a professor in the Department of Biochemistry.

He initiated his studies on protein-RNA complexes and the entire 30S subunit.

Later, he moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he is a Senior Scientist and Group Leader in the Structural Studies Division.

In the Aug 26, 2000, Ramakrishnan and his co-workers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus.

Ramakrishnan's crystal structures of the ribosome's small subunit have been crucial for the understanding of how the ribosome achieves its precision.

He identified something that could be described as a molecular ruler. Using the ruler twice, the ribosome double-checks that everything is correct.

In 2009, Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath.

He has been named for India's second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

Ramakrishnan is married to Vera Rosenberry, an author and illustrator of children's books.

He has a stepdaughter, Tanya Kapka, who is a doctor in Oregon, and a son, Raman Ramakrishnan, who is a cellist based in New York who plays with the Daedalus Quartet.

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