Yamuna Krishnan obtained her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore where she studied the self-assembly of lipids. Thereafter she worked with Shankar Balasubramanian at the University of Cambridge, as an 1851 Research Fellowship, studying four-stranded DNA structures called quadruplexes. In 2005, she started her independent group at the National Centre for Biological Sciences
(NCBS) in Bangalore, India, where she developed the prototype DNA nanodevice to measure ions in organelles. In 2014, she was parachuted into the University of Chicago at the Department of Chemistry, where her lab fully developed the technology, revealing new insights into how cells functioned with every new ion they imaged in cells. Her lab’s work has been recognised with the Bhatnagar award for Chemical Sciences, the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences, the Sun Pharma Award for Basic Medical Science, the Ono Pharma Breakthrough Science and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.
