Govindarajan Padmanaban is an Indian biochemist and biotechnologist. He was the former director of the Indian Institute of Science, and presently serves as honorary professor in the department of biochemistry at IISc
Padmanaban was brought up in a family of engineers in Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu but had settled in Bangalore. After completing his schooling in Bangalore, he joined the Presidency College in Madras to complete a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and completed his masters in Soil Chemistry at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi and Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Indian Institute of Science , Bangalore in 1966.

In the early years of his research, he primarily worked in the transcriptional regulation of Eukaryotic genes in the liver. He was interested in elucidating the multifaceted role of heme in cellular processes. His group discovered the heme-biosynthetic pathway in the malarial parasite and showed it to be a drug target. He has also been interested in the area of vaccine development. His team was successful in showing the antimalarial property of Curcumin and its efficacy in combination therapy in 2004.