Krishnan Raghavachari was born in Madras (now Chennai) in India in 1953. He obtained his B.Sc. degree in 1973 from Madras University and his M.Sc. degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1975. He then moved to Carnegie-Mellon University to work with legendary professor John. A. Pople and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1981. The same year, he joined Bell Laboratories, New Jersey, and received the distinguished researcher award at Bell Laboratories in 1987. He joined Indiana University, Bloomington as a professor of chemistry in 2002.
Prof. Raghavachari is perhaps best known for his work on the development and applications of electron correlation techniques in computational quantum chemistry. His work at Bell Laboratories covered a broad spectrum of problems ranging from chemical bonding in small clusters to computational investigations of semiconductor and nanoscale materials. Most recently, his group has focused on new electronic embedding methods in quantum chemistry, accurate models for theoretical thermochemistry, and on metal oxide clusters to explore their roles in catalytic activity.
Prof. Raghavachari is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has served on the advisory editorial boards of Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, Journal of Physical Chemistry, Journal of Materials Chemistry, and the Journal of Computational Chemistry. In 2006, he served as the chair of the Theoretical Chemistry subdivision of the American Chemical Society. In the summer of 2010, he was elected a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.