Professor Venkatraman Ramakrishnan grew up in India and moved to the U.S.A. in 1971. After initially being trained as a physicist at Ohio University, he switched to biology in 1976 at the University of California, San Diego. His interest in ribosomes dates back to 1978 when he joined Professor Peter Moore's laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

Professor Ramakrishnan began his independent career at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1983. In 1995 he moved to the University of Utah to become a professor of biochemistry. Finally, in 1999, Professor Ramakrishnan moved to his current position as a scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

In the past, Professor Ramakrishnan has also been interested in chromatin structure and in x-ray crystallographic methods. He currently focuses entirely on ribosome structure and function. In 2000, his laboratory determined the atomic structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its complexes with ligands and antibiotics. This work has led to insights into how the ribosome "reads" the genetic code, as well as into various aspects of antibiotic function. In the last few years, Professor Ramakrishan's laboratory has published structures of the entire ribosome in complex with tRNAs as well as release and elongation factors.

Professor Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.