Shankar Balasubramanian

Born in Madras (now Chennai) India in 1966,[1] Shankar Balasubramanian moved to the UK with his parents in 1967. He grew up in a rural area just outside Runcorn in Cheshire and attended Daresbury Primary School, then Appleton Hall High School (which has since amalgamated to form Bridgewater High School). He then went on to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he did his undergraduate degree from 1985–88 and continued with a PhD[17] for research on the reaction mechanism of the enzyme chorismate synthase supervised by Chris Abell (1988-1991).[18]

Following his PhD, Balasubramanian travelled to the USA as a SERC/NATO Research Fellow and worked in the group of Stephen J. Benkovic at Pennsylvania State University (1991-1993). He started his independent academic career in 1994 in the University of Cambridge and has remained there ever since, first as College Lecturer, then University Lecturer (1998), University Reader in Chemical Biology (2003) and Professor of Chemical Biology (2007). He was most recently appointed Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in 2008.[19] He currently directs research laboratories in the Department of Chemistry[8][9] and also the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Cambridge Institute at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.[20] His former doctoral students include Julian Huppert.[3][4]

Balasubramanian works in the field of nucleic acids. His citation on election to the Royal Society reads:

Shankar Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised leader in the field of nucleic acids who is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology. He has made seminal contributions to the identification, elucidation and manipulation of non-coding genetic elements, particularly four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. His work on the intervention of nucleic acid function using small molecules has revealed a number of molecular mechanisms that can be exploited, e.g. to modulate the biology of cancer.[21]

More recently Balasubramanian has been inventing and applying new chemical methods to study epigenetic changes to DNA bases including single base resolution sequencing of 5-formylcytosine, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine and 5-methylcytosine.[22][23][24]