Early Life and Education
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (in accordance with some Tamil family name traditions, his family name, Vilayanur, is placed first) was born in 1951 in Tamil Nadu, India. His father, V.M. Subramanian, was an engineer who worked for the U.N. Industrial Development Organization and served as a diplomat in Bangkok, Thailand. Ramachandran spent much of his youth moving among several different posts in India and other parts of Asia. As a young man he attended schools in Madras, Bangkok and England, and pursued many scientific interests, including conchology. Ramachandran obtained an M.B.B.S. from Stanley Medical College in Madras, India, and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. While a graduate student at Cambridge, Ramachandran also collaborated on research projects with faculty at Oxford, including David Whitteridge of the Physiology Department. He then spent two years at Caltech, as a research fellow working with Jack Pettigrew. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego in 1983, and has been a full professor there since 1998.
Ramachandran is the grandson of Sir Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, Advocate General of Madras and co-architect of the Constitution of India. He is married to Diane Rogers-Ramachandran and they have two boys, Mani and Jaya.
Read more about this topic: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves ...”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)