Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoc with Peter Moore at Yale University.After his post doc, he initially could not find a faculty position, although he had turned to some 50 universities in the U.S.
Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of Embo and the American National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was awarded the 2007 Louis Jeantet Prize for medicine in 2008, Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society and the 2009 Rolf Sammet Professor at the University of Frankfurt. In 2009, Ramakrishnan awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath.
