Subramania Ranganathan

Subramania Ranganathan (1934–2016) was an Indian bioorganic chemist and professor and head of the department of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He was known for his studies on synthetic and mechanistic organic chemistry and was an elected fellow Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences, India and the Indian Academy of Sciences The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1977, for his contributions to chemical sciences.

Biography

Ranganathan, born on 2 February 1934 in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, graduated in chemistry from Madras University and continued there to complete his master's degree in 1957. Before moving to US to pursue his doctoral studies on a Sloan Kettering Foundation fellowship, he worked at the biochemistry department of the Central Leather Research Institute for a short while. In the US, he enrolled at Ohio State University at Harold Shechter's laboratory and secured a PhD in 1962. He moved to the laboratory of Robert Burns Woodward, the 1965 Nobel laureate, at Harvard University for his post- doctoral studies and in 1964, he shifted to Woodward Research Institute, Basel to complete the studies in 1964.

Legacy During his post-doctoral days, Ranganathan worked closely with Woodward and was known to have assisted the latter in his work on Woodward–Hoffmann rules. His researches have been documented by way of a number of books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles; the online repository of Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 97 of them; and many authors have cited his researches in their publications.

Awards and honors Ranganathan received the Basudev Banerjee Medal in 1975 and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1977. He received R. C. Mehrotra Endowment Gold Medal in 2000 and the Silver Medal of the Chemical Research Society of India in 2001; CRSI would honor him again in 2006 with the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, he was awarded the Best Teacher Award by the Indian National Science Academy. He held lectureships of the University Grants Commission of India (1979–80), Science and Engineering Research Board (1991) and Department of Atomic Energy (2001) and delivered several award orations including Professor K. Venkatraman Lecture (1979), Professor A. B. Kulkarni Lecture (1982); Professor N. V. Subba Rao Memorial Lecture (1985), Professor T. R. Seshadri Memorial Lecturer (1993) and Maitreyi Memorial Lecture (1994). The Indian Academy of Sciences elected him as a fellow in 1975 and he became an elected fellow of and the Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India in 1981 and 1991 respectively.

Books