Dr. Akash Ranjan has earned his Graduate and Post Graduate Degrees from the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), New Delhi. Dr Ranjan joined AIIMS as B.Sc. (Hons.) Human Biology Student in 1986 and specialized in Molecular Biophysics. After completing his graduation in 1989 he joined the Master of Biotechnology Programme in the same institute.

Long before the Genome era, Dr. Ranjan showed a keen interest in applying computational tools to understand Biological systems. Dr. Ranjan received his Ph.D. Degree in Computational Genomics in 1996 from National Institute of Immunology, JNU, New Delhi, under the supervision of Dr. Seyed E. Hasnain, an eminent Scientist and presently the Director of Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad. In this work Dr. Ranjan applied computational tools to understand the regulation of gene expression in Baculovirus Based Expression Vector System (BEVS). He went on to demonstrate the role of  primary structure of gene in regulating the expression efficiency in the BEVS (Hasnain et al 1994, Ranjan and Hasnain 1994 & 1995, Misra et al 1995). 

After receiving Ph.D., Dr. Ranjan joined International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) New Delhi as Research Scientist and Research Fellow, Human Frontier Science Program, USA. At ICGEB, his work lead to the mapping of ligand binding site on Erythrocyte binding protein of the malaria parasites Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium knowlesi (Ranjan and Chitnis, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 1999). Dr. Ranjan also contributed to the development of a candidate malaria vaccine based on the functional domain of Erythrocyte Binding Protein (Singh et al J. Biol. Chem. 2001). This candidate vaccine was up scaled by Bharat Biotech Pvt. Limited Hyderabad and is currently under trial in South America.

From 1999 to 2000, Dr. Ranjan served as Assistant Professor, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. At BITS, he was interested in using PARAM 10000 based Parallel Super Computers for High Performance Computing in Biotechnology.

Dr. Ranjan joined Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hyderabad in July 2000 as Staff Scientist and Head, Computational and Functional Genomics Group. At CDFD, he is working on different areas of Functional Genomics. 

Dr. Ranjan is a WHO/TDR recognised Trainer in the field of Bioinformatics Applied to Microbial Genomics. He has organised many workshops and training program in the field of Bioinformatics.