Professor Ramanath received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1997. His doctoral work won him a Materials Research Society Graduate Student Award (now known as the Gold Award). He obtained his B.Tech. in Metallurgical Engineering from the IIT, Madras, India, and his M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Cincinnati. He was a staff member at Novellus Systems, CA, and a Visiting Scientist at the Physics Department of Linköping University, Sweden, before he joined the Rensselaer faculty in Fall 1998 as an Assistant Professor. He became a tenured Associate Professor in 2003, and was promoted to full Professor in 2006. He is a recipient of a Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (2000), Prof. Bergmann Memorial Young Scientist Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (2003), and is a co-recipient of IBM Research Partnership Award (1999-2006). He has been a Visiting Professor at the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan (summer 2004), the Nanoscale Science Department at the Max Planck Institute für Festkörperforschung, Stuttgart, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (2004-2005), and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India (summer 2006). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology since October 2003, and serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Experimental Nanoscience.

Professor Ramanath's current research interests are in the areas of synthesis, assembly, and characterization of nanostructures and thin films, with emphasis on exploring new materials and architectures for fabricating future nanodevices for computing, energy generation and management, and understanding the relationships between atomic-level structure and chemistry, and properties.