The 2009 Nobel prize for Chemistry won by Indian-born American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan along with two other scientists of America and Israel is a victory for inter-disciplinary approach to research, according to P.K. Ponnuswamy, an expert in Bio-physics and former Vice-Chancellor of Madras and Madurai Kamaraj Universities.
During his visit to the Department of Biophysics and Crystallography, University of Madras, in 2002, for the National Symposium on Biophysics, Dr. Venkatraman impressed the scientific community with his presentation, said Dr. Ponnuswamy, who had taken part in the symposium as a former faculty member of the department. "The slides presentation was a result of very hard work. Working on ribosome, a synthesis of protein molecules, is a very complex task. Dr. Venkatraman was considered an authority on the subject then," said Dr. Ponnuswamy.
Dr. Venkatraman visited the Department again in 2008 for delivering an endowment lecture named after late C.N. Ramachandran, a renowned scientist who had established the department.
