Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan assumed Presidency of the Royal Society

Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan on 1 December 2015 assumed Presidency of the Royal Society in London. He was elected to the office in March 2015 by the society’s council and will serve for up to five years.

With this appointment, he became the 61st president of the society. And, he joined the elite club that has included Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, and Ernest Rutherford.

About 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.

About Britain’s Royal Society

It is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists and was founded in 1660.

The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

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