Template:POTD/2019-07-30
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