The physicist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, deputy director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology, in England, is the new president of the Royal Society, one of the oldest and still among the most eminent scientific societies in the world, headquartered in the United Kingdom. Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his work on the structure and function of ribosomes. Born in India, he spent a good part of his career in the United States, before moving to England in 1999. As a result, he holds both British and US citizenships. He shifted to the biological sciences after completing his doctorate in physics. “That breadth is something I hope will help me,” the new president said in an interview with the journal Nature.
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