Govindarajan Padmanaban (born 20 March 1938, in Madras) is an Indian biochemist and biotechnologist.

He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Madras and master's degree in Soil Chemistry at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi and Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore in 1966.

In the early years of his research, he primarily worked in the transcriptional regulation of Eukaryotic genes in the liver.

His group discovered the heme-biosynthetic pathway in the malarial parasite and showed it to be a drug target.

His team was successful in showing the antimalarial property of Curcumin and its efficacy in combination therapy in 2004.