Prof. Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Ph.D.

Ram Krishnamurthy is Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

He studied chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay. For his Ph.D. he went to the Ohio State University in Columbus in the group of David Hart. He did his postdoc at ETH Zürich in the group of Albert Eschenmoser and returned to the U.S. as a NASA-NSCORT fellow with Gustaf Arrhenius at Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the UC San Diego in La Jolla, California. He stayed in La Jolla as senior research associate and later as assistant professor at the chemistry department at The Scripps Research Institute. Since 2005 he is an associate professor at this institute.

Ram Krishnamurthy's research interest is to study the chemistry of the origins of life: its origins, its evolution and its current state. Among other subjects, he investigates how RNA and DNA developed from simpler precursors or synthesizes alternative nucleic acid structures in an attempt to better understand the chemical properties that are fundamental to their biological function.

He is a Visiting Fellow in June and July 2018 in the context of the CAS Research Group "Recreating the Origin of Life" following an invitation from Prof. Dr. Dieter Braun.