Mohan Madan Babu

Early life and education Babu grew up in Chennai, India. He became interested in learning to program as a young child when his father brought home a personal computer.

Career and research After his PhD, Babu was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland with Aravind L. Iyer. In 2006, he became a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. In July 2020, Babu joined the faculty of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as the endowed chair in biological data science in the structural biology department and director of the center of excellence for data-driven discovery.

Babu's research focuses on understanding the regulation of cellular systems at varying scales, including molecular, system, and genomic levels. In particular, his research group studies G protein-coupled receptors and intrinsically disordered proteins using a combination of computational biology and experimental biology approaches.

Babu serves as chief editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology.

Awards and honours 2009: EMBO young investigator, European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) 2010: Won the Early Career Research Award from the Biochemical Society 2011: Awarded the Balfour Lecture by the Genetics Society 2011: Won the Royal Society of Chemistry Molecular BioSystems Award 2014: Awarded the Colworth Medal by the Biochemical Society 2014: Awarded the research prize by the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine 2014: Won the Protein Society Protein Science Young Investigator Award 2015: Awarded the Francis Crick Lecture by the Royal Society 2016: Elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization 2017: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) 2018: Won the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists from the New York Academy of Sciences 2018: Won the ISCB Innovator Award from the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) 2019: Won the EMBO Gold Medal 2021: Elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences 2023: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society