V.S. Ramachandran curates our tours of India and Sri Lanka and appears as a cohost on some of them.
He is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and distinguished professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and adjunct professor of biology at the Salk Institute. Ramachandran initially trained as a doctor, obtaining his M.D. from Stanley Medical College, Chennai, India, and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Ramachandran’s early work was on visual perception, but he is best known for his experiments in behavioral neurology which, despite their apparent simplicity, have had a profound impact on the way we think about the brain. He has been called “The Marco Polo of neuroscience” by Richard Dawkins and “The modern Paul Broca” by Eric Kandel.
Ramachandran is on the editorial boards of several international journals and has published over 180 papers in scientific journals (including five invited review articles in the Scientific American). He edited a four volume Encyclopedia of Human Behavior that was cited by Library Journal as “the most outstanding reference for 1994 in the behavioral sciences.” In 1995 he was elected a member of the Atheneum, the world’s oldest scientific club, and he gave the Decade of the Brain lecture at the 25th annual (Silver Jubilee) meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. In 2003 he gave the annual BBC Reith lectures and was the first physician/psychologist to give the lectures since they were begun by Bertrand Russel in 1949. In 2005 he was awarded the Henry Dale Medal and elected to an honorary life membership by the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where he also gave a Friday evening discourse (joining the ranks of Michael Faraday, Thomas Huxley, Humphry Davy, and others). In 2010 he delivered the annual Jawaharlal Nehru memorial lecture in New Delhi, India.
Most recently, the president of India conferred on him the second highest civilian award and honorific title in India, the Padma Bhushan. And Time magazine named him on their list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Ramachandran has a profound love for India, her ancient traditions and temples. He curates our tours, as well as appears on some of them.
Click here for Wikipedia article on Ramachandran.