Sir Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan is an Indian-American-British structural biologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. The ribosome is the molecular machine in every living cell that translates genetic information into proteins.
Born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, he studied physics in India before moving to the United States to pursue biology. He is a senior scientist and former President of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge — one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions.
He was knighted in 2012 for services to molecular biology and served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020 — only the second person of Asian origin to hold this distinguished position. He is widely regarded as one of the most important scientists of his generation.