Gautam Desiraju obtained his BSc (1972) from the U. of Bombay and PhD (1976) from the U. of Illinois, Urbana. He was in the University of Hyderabad between 1979 and 2009. In 2009, he joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. He is a very well known structural chemist with an H-index of 105. His books on crystal engineering (Elsevier, 1989) and the weak hydrogen bond (OUP, 1999) are now standard works in structural chemistry. He co-authored a textbook in crystal engineering in 2011 (World Scientific). He is Editor-in-Chief of Polyhedron and on the editorial advisory boards of Chemical Communications and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He is a Past President of the International Union of Crystallography. He received the Humboldt Forschungspreis in 2000 and an Honorary Doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba in Argentina in 2013. He received the ISA Medal for science of the University of Bologna in 2018. He received the 14th Ewald Prize of the International Union of Crystallography in 2026.