Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan named as President of Britain’s Royal Society

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.

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

1. He studied how genetic information is translated by the ribosome to make proteins and the action of antibiotics on this process.
2. The Indian-American scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 with Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath.
3. He was awarded a knighthood in 2012
4. He has a B.Sc in physics from Baroda University, India and a PhD from Ohio University in the USA.
5. He studied biology at the University of California, San Diego and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University.
6. 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.
7. 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.