Occam Places Manju Ramarao as CSO of Atomic AI

Occam’s momentum in techbio continues to accelerate with the placement of Manjunath “Manju” Ramarao, PhD as CSO of Atomic AI, an 8VC/Playground Global investment, which seeks to fuse cutting-edge machine learning with state-of-the-art structural biology to unlock RNA drug discovery.   

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Ramarao, a broadly gauged drug hunter and intellectual polymath of consequence, brings diverse and exquisitely relevant experience spanning biotech and Big Pharma. Before joining Atomic, Ramarao was Chief Scientific Officer at Ribometrix, where he was responsible for enabling the company’s technology platform and establishing the pipeline of small molecule programs. Previously, he was at Bristol Myers Squibb as part of the Biocon-Bristol Myers Squibb R&D Center (BBRC) in Bangalore, India, and held numerous leadership positions, most recently as Executive Director, Site Leader for Research and Early Development and Head of Discovery Biology andTranslational Medicine. During Ramarao’s tenure at BBRC, he helped develop therapeutic platforms and a pipeline of portfolio programs across various therapeutic domains, such as oncology, neurology, immunology, fibrosis, and cardiovascular disease. Ramarao was also a Principal Research Investigator at Pfizer (Wyeth) in Cambridge, MA.

He holds a BSc and MSc from BangaloreUniversity, India, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Physiology from the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign. His post-graduate experience included a post-doctoral fellowship and an instructor position at Harvard Medical School.