Sharad Ramanathan

Sharad Ramanathan, Ph.D., is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University and a Visiting Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Ramanathan’s research is directed towards answering two questions. How do cells and organisms process signals from their environment to make decisions? How do the underlying circuits make this possible? To answer these questions he uses a combination of computational, theoretical and experimental tools. Ramanathan’s experimental work has focuses on different organisms to uncover general principles that underlie decision making. Ramanathan received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard University and his and undergraduate degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Since 2000, he has been a member of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard (most recently as a Bauer Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Science’s Center for Systems Biology) and has simultaneously served as a technical staff member at Bell Laboratories at Alcatel-Lucent.