Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju was born on 21 August 1952, in Chennai and is presently an honorary professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a recipient of several prestigious international awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis, the TWAS Award in Chemistry and the ISI Medal for Science of the University of Bologna. He was President of the International Union of Crystallography between 2011–2014. As IUCr President, he proposed to the United Nations that 2014 be celebrated as the International Year of Crystallography. He spearheaded this resolution and inaugurated the Year in UNESCO, Paris in January 2014 sharing the podium with Irena Bokova, the then Director General of UNESCO.