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Sir Venki, who is deputy director of the Medical Research Council¡¯s Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, will take over from fellow Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse on 1 December.

He shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2009 ¡°for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome¡±: the molecular machinery in cells that turns genetic information into proteins.

Last year he spoke to Times Higher Education about winning the prize, recalling how he spent most of his prize money on buying a 19th-century Italian cello for his son, who is a professional musician.

Sir Venki studied physics at Baroda 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ in India and Ohio 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ in the US before studying biology as a graduate student at the 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of California, San Diego.

He was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ and a staff biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory before becoming professor of biochemistry at the 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of Utah. He moved to the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in 1999 specifically to pursue his study of the ribosome.

paul.jump@tesglobal.com