Indians seem to be making waves all over the world! Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an Indian born scientist, along with Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for mapping ribosomes, the protein-producing factories within cells, at the atomic level.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in the year 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. He shares the Chemistry Nobel prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their "studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".

Ramakrishnan completed his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and earned his Ph.D. in Physics (1976) from Ohio University, USA.

He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.