Sir Venki Ramakrishnan confirmed as President Elect of the Royal Society

Nobel laureate Sir Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan has been confirmed as President Elect of the Royal Society.

The result of a ballot of the Fellowship was confirmed at a meeting of the Society’s Council today. He will take up the post of President on 1 December 2015.

Sir Venki studies how genetic information is translated by the ribosome to make proteins, and the action of antibiotics on this process. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 with Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath and was awarded a knighthood in 2012.

Sir Venki is currently Deputy Director of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 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 U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (the German Science Academy) and a Foreign Member of the Indian National Science Academy.

There have been 60 Presidents of the Royal Society since it was founded in 1660. Previous Presidents of the Royal Society have included Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, and Ernest Rutherford.