Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is an Indian-born British structural biologist and Nobel laureate. He was born on 1 April, 1952, in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India. Ramakrishnan is best known for his pioneering work on the structure and function of the ribosome, a complex molecular machine essential for protein synthesis. Ramakrishnan's most notable achievement was his determination of the high-resolution structure of the ribosome using X-ray crystallography. In 2009, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Ada Yonath and Thomas A. Steitz, for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome. This breakthrough provided crucial insights into how the ribosome translates the genetic code into proteins, which has significant implications for understanding fundamental biological processes and the development of new antibiotics.