Professor Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge
Prof. Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan is an Indian-born American and British structural biologist, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath, "for studies on the structure and function of the ribosome".

Ramakrishnan obtained his PhD degree in Physics from Ohio University in 1976. He spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.

Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and continued to work on ribosomes at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1999, he moved to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Ramakrishnan's laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics, and has provided structural insights into the mechanism that ensures the fidelity of protein biosynthesis. More recently, his laboratory has determined the atomic structure of the whole ribosome complex with its tRNA and mRNA ligands.

Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of EMBO and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was awarded the 2007 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the 2008 Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society and the 2009 Rolf-Sammet Professorship at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2009, Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, and the Padma Vibhushan, in 2010. Ramakrishnan was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to Molecular Biology.