V. Sasisekharan

Viswanathan Sasisekharan (born 1933) is an Indian biophysicist known for his work on the structure and conformation of biopolymers. He introduced the use of torsion angles to describe polypeptide and protein conformation, a central principle of the (φ, ψ) plot (later known as the Ramachandran plot). Additionally, he was the first to introduce alternative models of DNA structure that provided insights beyond the standard double helix model. For his contributions to the biological sciences, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of India’s highest science awards, in 1978.