Prof. Ramakrishna Vijayacharya Hosur is a Senior Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. He is also the Director of the University of Mumbai – Department of Atomic Energy Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences (UM-DAE CBS), which is envisaged to be a role model for Universities to follow for improving higher education in the country.
He has done pioneering work in the broad areas of Biophysical Chemistry, Structural Biology and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. He is internationally recognized for his scientific contributions specifically, development of scaling techniques in multidimensional NMR, discovery of new structural motifs in DNA: A-Tetrad, T-Tetrad, C-Tetrad, development of HNN suite of multidimensional NMR experiments for proteins, development of approaches and algorithms for rapid determination of solution structures of small proteins, sometimes in less than a day, elucidation of complete pathway of equilibrium folding transitions in proteins, and first ever structural characterization of megadalton size protein aggregates by solution state NMR.
Prof. Hosur has also made remarkable contributions in the interdisciplinary area of Structural Biology. His research encompasses development of Multidimensional NMR methods and their applications to investigation of protein structure, folding, self-association, DNA structure and dynamics, all of which have great implications in understanding biological functions.
After completing his M.Sc. in Chemistry from IIT Bombay, Prof. Hosur completed his Ph.D. from TIFR, Mumbai University and undertook his post-doctoral training at ETH-Zurich, Switzerland. Prof. Hosur is recipient of INSA Young Scientist Award (1984); INSA Jagadish Shankar Lecture Award (1989); B.M. Birla Award (1992); INSA R. K. Asundi Memorial Lecture Award (1998); JC Bose National Fellowship of DST (2007); and G. N. Ramachandran Gold Medal of CSIR (2009), among others. To top it all, Prof. Hosur was awarded the ‘Padma Shri’ by the Government of India in 2014.
Prof. Hosur has been a Council member of: Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata; Centre for Biomedical Magnetic Resonance, Lucknow; Academic Council of University of Mumbai. He has been fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, (1994), Indian National Science Academy (INSA) 1995, National Academy of Sciences (NASI) 1997 and The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) 2008. He has been in the Council of INSA (2008-10) and NASI (2009-11 and 2013-14). He has also been an elected President of the Indian Biophysical Society (2003-05), New Biology Section of Indian Science Congress (2005) and National Magnetic Resonance Society (2009-11).
Prof. Hosur has published more than 185 papers in journals of international repute and written/edited three books. He is deeply interested in Sanskrit and likes to read original literature by renowned philosophers. Sports, Classical music (singing) and Indian Philosophy are his other areas of interest.