Preface

Special Issue in Honor of Professor N. Rama Krishna

It is my great honor to dedicate this preface of the special issue for my former boss and advisor, Professor N. Rama Krishna. He graduated with a PhD degree from the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 1972 under the mentorship of Professor B. D. Nageswara Rao. After graduating, he joined Professor Sidney L. Gordon’s laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow, and then as a Research Associate with Professor R. E. D. McClung at the University of Alberta, Canada before he was recruited by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), USA.

At UAB, Professor N. Rama Krishna was a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. He had served as the Director of the UAB Cancer Center Nuclear Magnetic Resonance facility (NMR) Facility for over 32 years, and as the first Director of the Central Alabama High-Field NMR Facility that he established at UAB with Bruker NMR instruments ranging from 850 MHz to 500 MHz, before retiring as an Emeritus Professor in 2018. He received a number of awards and honors (including the election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), served as reviewer for several high-impact scientific journals, served as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and for private funding agencies for scientific research, and was a member of several Study Sections at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In addition, Professor Rama Krishna and his colleague Professor Lawrence Berliner edited 3 outstanding books on the significant advances in NMR techniques and methods for the “Biological Magnetic Resonance” series (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers), viz, volumes 16 (Modern Techniques in Protein NMR), 17 (Structure Computation and Dynamics in Protein NMR), and 20 (Protein NMR for the Millennium).

Dr Rama Krishna’s fascination and experience with NMR spectroscopy started in the era of frequency-sweep 1D-NMR, then Fourier Transform 1D-NMR, followed by 2D-, 3D-, and 4D-NMR spectroscopy. In his early days (prior to joining UAB as a faculty member), he made significant contributions in the Chemical Physics applications of NMR focusing on nuclear magnetic double resonance study of nuclear spin relaxation in coupled spin systems in liquids, the conditions for the breakdown of the equivalence of continuous wave NMR and FT-NMR, and the density matrix description of intermolecular solvent-solute nuclear Overhauser effects (NOEs). After joining UAB as a faculty member his research interests shifted to biomolecular studies. In 1978, Dr Rama Krishna introduced the NOE R-factor, the relaxation rate matrix method for structure determination of peptides and proteins, NOE-intensity-restrained optimization of torsion angles to refine the structures of peptides and proteins, and afterwards his laboratory developed the CORCEMA (1995) and CORCEMA-ST (2002) methods. All of these methods developed in his laboratory continue to have a major impact on the biomolecular NMR field. His research interests are very broad, and cover chemical physics, structural biology and medicine, with emphasis on the development of NMR methodologies, and structural and dynamics studies of proteins and protein complexes, nucleic acids, complex carbohydrates, and drug discovery.

He supported his research program at UAB over the years by securing grants from the NIH, NSF, American Heart Association, Arthritis Foundation, and the Leukemia Society of America. The graduate and postdoctoral students and NMR staff members trained in his research group over the years at UAB went on to establish highly successful careers of their own in academy and in industry.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere respect to my former advisor and teacher. Congratulations to Professor Rama Krishna on his retirement following a highly successful career at UAB!