Vikram B Mehta obtained his BSc (1966) and MSc (1968) in Mathematics from Bombay University, Mumbai, and the MA (1970) and PhD (1976) from the University of California with specialization in Algebraic Geometry. On return to India he joined the School of Mathematics, Tata Institute of fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai.

Academic and Research Achievements: The work of Mehta is concerned mainly with the study of semi-stable bundles and questions of Schubert varieties, where it has had great impact. A special feature of his work is that he has often relied on positive characteristic methods to deduce results even in characteristic zero. The notion of Frobenius split varieties introduced by Mehta along with Ramanathan is a land-mark work. This is considered as one of the most significant developments in the study of Schubert varieties and ranks among the very best contributions of Indian mathematicians. It is an entirely new way of handling the geometry of these varieties and Mehta and others continue to find new situations where the idea yield many interesting results. In another significant and joint work with Ramanathan, he has shown that the restriction of a semi-stable bundle to a general hypersurface of sufficiently large degree remains semi-stable. Combining this result with some work of Donaldson, they have deduced that a stable bundles on a smooth projective variety with vanishing Chern classes is induced by a unitary irreducible representation of the fundamental group, generalizing the Narasimhan-Seshadri theorem for compact Riemann surfaces. He has published more than 20 research paper in reputed journals.

Awards and Honours: Dr Mehta is a recipient of SS Bhatnagar Award (1991).