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, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“the cluttered eyes
of early mysterious night.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Those who first introduced compulsory education into American life knew exactly why children should go to school and learn to read: to save their souls.... Consistent with this goal, the first book written and printed for children in America was titled Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, drawn from the Breasts of both Testaments for their Souls’ Nourishment.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)