[5] Born on 27 November 1960,[6] Raghavan Varadarajan completed his graduate and master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1982 and moved to the US for his doctoral studies at Stanford University under the guidance of Steven G. Boxer to secure a PhD.
[4] His post-doctoral studies were at Yale University at the laboratory of Frederic M. Richards during 1988–92 and he returned to India to start his academic career at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1992.
Holding the position of a professor of Molecular Biophysics Unit,[7] he heads The Varadarajan Laboratory of IISc which has research interests in the design of HIV-1 and influenza immunogens.
[8] He also serves as an honorary professor at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research[9] and as the chairman of the scientific board of Theramyt Novobiologics, a Bengaluru-based research platform (which he helped found), engaged in the development of biological drugs.
[4] Continuing his researches at IISc, he is known to have developed a new crystallographic and Nuclear magnetic resonance hydrogen exchange protocol for the characterization of disordered states of proteins[13] and his studies helped in the estimation of the hydrophobic driving force in protein folding.