Dipendra Prasad earned his BSc degree (1978) from St Xavier College, University of Mumbai, MSc (1980) from IIT, Kanpur and PhD (1989) from Harvard University. His specialization is in Number Theory. He served as a Fellow (1990-93) and Reader (1993-97), TIFR, Mumbai; Associate Professor (1994-77) and Professor (1997- ), Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad.

Academic and Research Achievements: Most of the research work of Dipendra Prasad has been in the area of representation theory of p-adic groups. Several of his papers, some in collaboration with Gross, point out to the crucial role played by local root numbers in questions in representation theory, and have found important applications to questions in number theory. He has contributed to the relationship between Theta correspondence and Langlands' parameterization. He has characterized self-dual representations of p-adic groups, as well as finite groups of Lie type. He has classified representations of GL (n,k) which are distinguished i.e. have an invariant linear form for the subgroups GL (n,k) or U (n,k), where K is a quadratic unramified extension of a non-Archimedean local field k. This settles a conjecture of Jacquet. This work is a consequence of an earlier work that Prasad did on a similar question but for finite groups of Lie type. This work was noticed by Lusztig who has proved a finer result for certain class of representations of finite groups of Lie type. In another recent work, Prasad has looked at an analogue of a conjecture of Mazur on Diophantine approximation to tori which appear naturally in number theory (Mazur's conjecture was originally formulated for algebraic varieties over Q.). In a joint work with C Khare, Prasad has proved that the order modulo p of a rational point on an abelian variety over Q determines both the rational point and the Abelian variety up to isogeny.

Awards and Honours: Prasad is a recipient of the Swarna Jayanti Fellowship in 1999 and the SS Bhatnagar Award (2002). He is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad.