Veerabhadran Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs and numerous other manmade trace gases in the 1970s. He correctly forecast in 1980, along with R. Madden, that the global warming due to carbon dioxide would be detectable by the year 2000. He has worked with NASA to demonstrate the cooling effect of clouds on the planet, and the impacts of 'brown' clouds and greenhouse gases on rainfall, harvests of different types of crops, and the melting of glaciers.

Ramanathan currently chairs the UNEP‐sponsored ABC Project with science team members from the US, Europe, India, China, Japan, Korea and other Asian countries. He is the recipient of the American Meteorological Society’s Rossby medal. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europea and the Third World Academy of Sciences. He currently chairs the US National Academy of Sciences panel that provides strategic advice to the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) which is a $2 billion/year inter‐agency research program on climate change.

Ramanathan has published more than 175 peer‐reviewed articles in major journals. He is part of the Nobel Peace prize (2007) winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception, and for the 2007 report served as one of the lead editors in IPCC‐AR4 (2007), WG‐I. He received his undergraduate and graduate education in India and earned his Ph.D. in planetary atmospheres from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.