Venkatraman Ramakrishnan PhD

Venkatraman was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, an ancient temple town in Tamil Nadu best known for its temple of Nataraja, the lord of dance. When he was born, his father, C.V. Ramakrishnan, was away on a postdoctoral fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin, with the famous enzymologist David Green. Because he came from a poor family, he did not think that he could support his mother and on his postdoctoral income, so he went alone. He often joke that but for this, he would have been born in Madison and could have gone on to become President of the United States.

In fact, he first saw him when he was about six months old. His mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, He was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family. When he was about a year and a half, his father left again, this time with his mother, to go to Ottawa on a National Research Council fellowship. They returned a little over a year later, and during their absence he was brought up by his grandmother and his aunt Gomathi, to whom he remain close to this day.