Nobel laureate Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was named as the President of Britain’s prestigious Royal Society, a communion of the many of the world’s most distinguished scientists.
Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Ramakrishnan, who will take up the post on the 1 December 2015, will succeed geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, also a Nobel Laureate.
Nicknamed as Venky, the scientist is based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.
Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
- He studied how genetic information is translated by the ribosome to make proteins and the action of antibiotics on this process.
- The Indian-American scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 with Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath.
- He was awarded a knighthood in 2012
- He has a B.Sc in physics from Baroda University, India and a PhD from Ohio University in the USA.
- He studied biology at the University of California, San Diego and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University.
- Subsequently, he was a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah before he moved to the UK in 1999.
- He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (the German Science Academy) and a Foreign Member of the Indian National Science Academy.
Britain’s Royal Society
- A self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists
- Founded in 1660
- Since establishment, the Society has seen 60 Presidents and some of them included Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy and Ernest Rutherford.
Fundamental Purpose
- To recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.