Krishnasami Venkataraman

Krishnaswami Venkataraman FNA, FASc, FNASc, FRSC (7 June 1901 – 12 May 1981), popularly known as KV, was an Indian organic chemist and the first Indian director at National Chemical Laboratory (NCL Pune) and University Department of Chemical Technology, Mumbai (UDCT).

[1] Krishnaswami Venkataraman was born on 7 June 1901 in Madras (present-day Chennai), Madras Presidency during the British Colonial rule, in a learned Tamil Brahmin family, to P. S. Krishnaswami, a civil engineer, Sanskrit scholar and the translator of Valmiki Ramayana into Tamil, as the middle-born of his three sons.

[2] His brothers were K. Swaminathan, a professor of English who was the chief editor of the collected works of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Krishnaswami Srinivas Sanjivi, a noted medical doctor who founded Voluntary Health Services and is considered by many to be the father of the primary health care movement in India.

[4] Subsequently, he moved to England where he joined the University of Manchester on a scholarship from the Government of Tamil Nadu and obtained MSc (Tech) in colour chemistry.

He remained in England for his doctoral research, along with another noted chemist, T. R. Seshadri, at the laboratory of Robert Robinson which earned him a PhD and later a DSc from the University of Manchester.

[7] Lovraj Kumar, an Indian civil servant and a former secretary of the ministries of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Steel, was his son-in-law and Radha Kumar, a noted author, historian, feminist and academic was his granddaughter.

[note 3] He was the first scientist in India to use X-ray crystallographers for finding solutions to problems of organic structure.

[4] He guided around 85 students in their doctoral research which included such notable chemists as B. D. Tilak,[14][15] B. S. Joshi,[16] Nitya Anand and A. V. Rama Rao.

[2][note 4] His contributions are reported in the development of National Chemical Laboratory into one of World's leading research centre in dyestuff chemistry.