Tyakal Nanjundiah Venkataramana earned his BSc (1979) from Yuvaraja's College and PhD (1990) from Bombay University with specialization in Algebraic Groups and Automorphic Forms. He held various positions such as Research Assistant (1980-84), Research Associate (1984-88), Fellow (1988-93), Reader (1993-97) and Associate Professor (1997) and Professor in TIFR, Mumbai.

Academic and Research Achievements: Arithmeticity of Lattices in higher rank real Lie groups was one of the most important achievements that led to GA Margulis being awarded the Fields medal in 1979. Venkataramana's first major work was the extension of Margulis's work to the case of groups in positive characteristics. This is a beautiful piece of work in which Venkataramana in fact stole a march over Margulis himself; the latter also obtained extensions of his results but was unable to handle some of the most delicate cases while Venkataramana obtained results without any exclusions. The non-vanishing of the first Betti number in all arithmetic subgroups SO(n, 1), n?4, n?7 is the main result of. Apart from the fact that these were much-sought-after results the techniques introduced here were very novel and surprising. Recent work by Venkataramana on the Cohomology of Shimura Varieties also shows a great deal of originality of ideas and techniques. He (partly in collaboration with L Clozel) has been able to get many new results in this highly competitive area. Venkataramana is undoubtedly one among the leading mathematicians in the world working in the area.

Awards and Honours: Venkataramana is a recipient of Young Scientist Award (1990), Birla Award (2000), ICTP Prize (2000) and SS Bhatnagar Award (2001). He is a Fellow, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.