Sundararaman Ramanan commenced his postgraduate studies in 1957 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai and obtained his PhD (Mumbai) under the guidance of MS Narasimhan. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University and then at Harvard University, Cambridge. During his long tenure at TIFR, he contributed actively towards its recognition as a leading international centre of research in pure mathematics. He was Visiting Professor at many universities in Switzerland, USA, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan and Mexico..

Academic and Research Achievements: Ramanan's researches relate to Lie groups and homogeneous spaces, differential geometry and algebraic geometry. His major articles have laid foundation for a study of the moduli of vector bundles over algebraic curves. He is regarded internationally as one of the creators of the subject. In addition, his work on homogeneous vector bundles, on linear systems in Abelian varieties, on Grassmannian and Schubert varieties (with A Ramanathan), and on geometric invariant theoretic questions over fields of positive characteristic (also with A Ramanathan) have all proved to be fundamental. His studies (with MS Narasimhan) on universal connections have been seminal and continue to be of importance in diverse fields. He has had twelve graduate students, four of whom went on to get the Bhatnagar prize themselves. He also authored two books, Moduli of Abelian Varieties (with Allan Adler) and Global Calculus, besides several expository articles..

Other Contributions: Ramanan served as Member Secretary of the National Board for Higher Mathematics (NHBM) when it was set up. Since his retirement from TIFR in 2002, he has been involved in teaching graduate and undergraduate students at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Chennai Mathematical Institute. He was a Member, INSA Council (1983-85). He edited several conference proceedings, both in India and abroad. He was one of the editors of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences of the Indian Academy of Sciences (1982-86), Editor, TIFR's mathematics publications (1989-2001), and NBHM publications (inception till 1991). .

Awards and Honours: Professor Ramanan was awarded the SS Bhatnagar Prize (1979), Mathematics Award by the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (2001) and National Lecturer Award by UGC (1978). He was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad, and Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.