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:
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow- men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)