Venki Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his structural study of ribosomes. A fundamental discovery in molecular biology, this work has been integral in the production of antibiotics.

Ramakrishnan grew up in India where he studied Physics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He later earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Ohio University including two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. Ramakrishnan joined Yale University as a postdoctoral fellow and worked as a staff scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He served as a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Utah before moving to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.