He was a teacher in Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1986 to 2018. At JNU, he taught in the School of Physical Sciences and the School of Computational and Integrative Sciences. From 1983 to 1986, he was at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. Between 2011 and 2015, he served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad. An elected Fellow of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, and the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, Ramaswamy served as President of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 2016 to 2018. Currently, he is Honorary Professor in the Department of Physics at IIT Delhi and the DD Kosambi Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Goa.
Educated at Madras University, IIT Kanpur, and Princeton University, Prof. Ramaswamy’s research interests have mainly been in the physical sciences. In the past decade, however, he has had a serious engagement with the life and work of DD Kosambi. He has edited DD Kosambi: Selected works in Mathematics and Statistics, and Adventures into the Unknown, both collections of articles by and on Kosambi, as well as A Fragmented Feminism: The Life and Letters of Anandibai Joshee by Meera Kosambi.
A recipient of the New India Fellowship in 2023, he is currently working on an intellectual biography of DD Kosambi.