Indian Americans Sunil Amrith from Harvard and Akshay Venkatesh from Stanford to receive Infosys Prize 2016

BENGALURU (TIP): Prof. Sunil Amrith, Mehra family professor of South-Asian studies, professor of history, Harvard University and Prof. Akshay Venkatesh, professor, department of mathematics, Stanford University are among six recipients of Infosys Prize 2016 in the categories of Humanities and Mathematical Sciences, respectively.

Sunil Amrith is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His research is on the trans-regional movement of people, ideas, and institutions. Areas of interest include the history of public health and poverty, the history of migration, and environmental history. His most recent work has been on the Bay of Bengal as a region connecting South and Southeast Asia. He has a PhD in History (2005) from the University of Cambridge, where he was also a Research Fellow of Trinity College (2004-6).

Akshay Venkatesh is an Indian Australian professor in the mathematics department at Stanford. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory.He is the only Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematics Olympiad, which he did at the age of 12

The Infosys Science Foundation (ISF) on November 18 announced six winners of the Infosys Prize 2016 in the categories of Engineering and Computer Science, Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences.

The winners for the Infosys Prize 2016 were shortlisted from over 250 nominations by a jury panel, comprising renowned scientists and professors. The awards ceremony for the Infosys Prize 2016 will be held on 7 January 2017 in Bengaluru, where Prof. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society and Nobel Prize Laureate will felicitate the winners, the foundation said in a statement. The prize for each category consists of a purse of Rs65 lakh, a 22-carat gold medallion and a citation certificate.

The winners of the Infosys Prize 2016 are: (1) Engineering and computer science: Prof. V. Kumaran, professor, department of chemical engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru; (2) Humanities: Prof. Sunil Amrith, Mehra family professor of South-Asian studies, professor of history, Harvard University; (3) Life Sciences: Dr. Gagandeep Kang, executive director of Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Faridabad; (4) Mathematical Sciences: Prof. Akshay Venkatesh, professor, department of mathematics, Stanford University; (5) Physical Sciences: Dr. Anil Bhardwaj, director, space physics laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, and (6) Social Sciences: Prof. Kaivan Munshi, Frank Ramsey professor of economics, faculty of economics, University of Cambridge.