A Nobel-prizewinning structural biologist will be the next president of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s pre-eminent scientific institution. Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan will take over from geneticist Paul Nurse, also a Nobel laureate, on 1 December. Ramakrishnan is currently deputy director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He was awarded a share in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his work on the structure and function of the ribosome, a molecular machine that translates genetic information to build proteins. The Royal Society was founded in 1660.