Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Trivia

• Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of EMBO and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
• Ramakrishnan became the seventh Indian or person of Indian origin to win the Nobel Prize.
• Ramakrishnan will be awarded the Nobel Prize along with one-third of the total prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million), in a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
• In 2000, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan's laboratory determined the structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics.
• Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has published more than 95 research papers, the earliest being in 1977.
• Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University in Gujarat and later migrated to the US to continue his studies where he later got settled and attained US citizenship.
• He earned his Ph.D in Physics from Ohio University in the US and later worked as a graduate student at the University of California from 1976-78.
• During his stint at the varsity, Ramakrishnan conducted a research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist and later designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology.
• As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.
• Ramakrishnan, now a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has authored several important papers in academic journals.