Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy received his B.Sc. in chemistry from Vivekananda College (University of Madras) and M.Sc. in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University (OSU), under the guidance of David Hart, working on free radical chemistry applications to organic synthesis and methodology. Influenced by an enchanting lecture at OSU by Albert Eschenmoser on the chemical etiology of nucleic acid structure, he did his postdoctoral work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich with Eschenmoser, working on alternative nucleic acids and analogs of RNA. He then continued the work as a NASA-NSCORT fellow with Gustaf Arrhenius at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, investigating mineral catalyzed reactions leading to synthesis of sugar phosphates. He then rejoined Eschenmoser at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, resulting in a 13-year collaborative partnership. He is currently an associate professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute.

Krishnamurthy is a scientific collaborator with the Center for Chemical Evolution at the Georgia Institute of Technology and has been appointed as a co-lead of the Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments (PCE3) Consortium, one of the five Research Coordination Networks within the NASA Astrobiology Program.