V. Ramakrishnan Biography 
V. Ramakrishnan is Indian born structural biologist of America. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for his study of ribosome. He is at present working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the Cambridge University in England. He was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu. His parents are C. V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi and both of them were scientists and were teaching biochemistry at the Maharaj Sayajirao University in Baroda.
He studied at Convent of Jesus and Mary in Baroda. In between he spent two years in Adelaide in Australia. After finishing his pre-science he finished the bachelors’ degree in the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on a National Science Talent Scholarship in physics in 1971. He went to USA and obtained his Doctorate in physics in Ohio University in 1976. He spent two years studying biology at the University of California at San Diego. He married Vera Rosenberry and has one stepdaughter Tanya Kapka and a son Raman Ramakrishnan.
He started to work on ribosomes and registered at Yale University with Peter Moore for postdoctoral degree. He continued his works from 1983 to 95 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He worked as Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Utah in 1995 and in 1999 he started to work in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge at England. He worked on the fidelity of protein biosynthesis and histone and chromatin structure.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge. He received the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007 and Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society in 2008 and Rolf Sammet Professorship at the University of Frankfurt in 2008. He received Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 and Padma Vibhushan award from Government of India in 2010.
Published: N/A
Updated: December 30, 2012
