[15][16] Born in Madras (now Chennai) India in 1966,[2] Shankar Balasubramanian moved to the UK with his parents in 1967.

He went on to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he did his undergraduate degree from 1985 to 1988 and continued with a PhD[17] for research on the reaction mechanism of the enzyme chorismate synthase supervised by Chris Abell (1988–1991).

His citation on election to the Royal Society reads: Shankar Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised leader in the field of nucleic acids who is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences.

He has made seminal contributions to the identification, elucidation and manipulation of non-coding genetic elements, particularly four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes.

His work on the intervention of nucleic acid function using small molecules has revealed a number of molecular mechanisms that can be exploited, e.g. to modulate the biology of cancer.