Gautam Desiraju was born in
Chennai, India. After schooling at Cathedral and John Connon Boys School in
Bombay, he obtained a B.Sc. from St. Xavier's College, Bombay in 1972. Under the guidance of David Y. Curtin and Iain C. Paul, he gained a PhD in 1976 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked between 1976 and 1978 at the research laboratories of
Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A. From 1978 to 1979, he was a research fellow at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 1979, he joined the
University of Hyderabad as a lecturer, was promoted to reader in 1984, and became a professor in 1990. After 30 years at the University of Hyderabad, he joined the
Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 2009. Desiraju has guided the PhD work of about 40 students and mentored about 100 postdoctoral associates. He has authored more than 475 research papers. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of
Chemical Communications and the
Journal of the American Chemical Society. He is the editor-in-chief of
Polyhedron. He chaired the first
Gordon Research Conferences on Crystal Engineering in 2010 and served as president of the
International Union of Crystallography from 2011 to 2014. In August 2017, he organised the 24th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography in Hyderabad, India. Desiraju has received honorary doctorate degrees from
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina,
Rayalaseema University, Kurnool, and
Gulbarga University, Kalaburagi. He has won international awards such as the
Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis and the
TWAS award in Chemistry. He was awarded the Acharya P. C. Ray Medal (2015) by the
University of Calcutta for innovation in science and technology, the ISA Medal (2018) for Science by the
University of Bologna, and the Van der Waals Prize (2023) by ICNI, Strasbourg. ==Scholarly contributions==