Somesh Dasgupta was awarded his PhD degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1983). He was Professor of Theoretical Statistics and Mathematics Division, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta and Professor and Chairman, Statistics Graduate Faculty, University of Minnesota, USA.

Academic and Research Achievements: Dasgupta’s major contributions to statistics were in classification and discrimination, multivariate statistical inference and probability inequalities. These included decision theoretic approach in classification with unknown parameters, monotonicity property and error bounds for standard classification rules. He derived the monotonicity property of a large class of multivariate tests and obtained fundamental results on probability inequalities and unimodal functions.

Other Contributions: Professor Dasgupta was a Member of the UGC Committee on Curriculum of Statistics; and Advisory Committee, Development of Scientific and Technical Personnel, Union Ministry of Human Resources Development. Furthermore, he served on the editorial boards of Journal of Multivariation Analysis and Indian Journal of Statistics for many years.

Awards and Honours: Somesh Dasgupta was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (USA) and the American Statistical Association.