Prof. Ranganathan grew up in San Diego, and received his undergraduate degree in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UC San Diego, working jointly with Charles Zuker, Chuck Stevens, and Roger Tsien, and carried out brief postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School (with Rod MacKinnon) and the Salk Institute (with Joe Noel). He was at UT Southwestern Medical Center from 1997–2017, where he built his laboratory and founded the Green Center for Systems Biology. Since late 2017, he joined the University of Chicago, with joint appointments in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. He is building the new Center for the Physics of Evolving Systems at UChicago.
Together with Prof. Andrew Ferguson, he co-founded Evozyne, a Chicago-based startup that aims to use machine learning techniques to revolutionize the field of protein design and engineering.
From atomic to ecosystem scales, living systems exhibit exquisite structural and functional properties while yet remaining adaptive to fluctuating environmental conditions. We seek to find answers to three fundamental questions: what is the basic architecture of these systems, how do they work, and why are they built the way they are? We use a combination of statistical genomics, biochemistry, genetics in several model organsisms, structural biology, and physical theory to understand the evolutionary design of proteins and macromolecular complexes.