Rajeeva Karandikar obtained his BSc from Holkar Science College, Indore and MStat degree from Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. He worked with BV Rao in the field of Stochastic processes to obtain his PhD degree (1981) from ISI. He went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a post-doctoral Fellow to work with G Kallianpur. He returned to the ISI where he worked for several years before joining Crane Software as Executive Vice-President. He has been Visiting Professor at UNC, Chapel Hill, University of Minnesota, Erasmus University, Rotterdam and UC Santa Barbara.

Academic and Research Achievements: Karandikar taught at ISI, Delhi and has made contributions in several areas of probability theory. These include stochastic calculus, semimartingales, pathwise approximations of solutions to Stochastic differential equations, Markov processes, diffusion processes, martingale problems, filtering theory, linear and non-linear, finitely additive probability theory; Stochastic differential equations in infinite dimensions; financial applications of Stochastic processes, option pricing theory; Boltzman equation and associated Stochastic process; psephology in the context of Indian elections; cryptography, design and analysis of block ciphers; Monte Carlo simulation and so on. He has published several papers and authored two books.

Other Contributions: Professor Karandikar was involved in many activities related to Mathematics and Statistics at the national level. He was National Coordinator for Indian National Mathematical Olympiad and a member of National Board of Higher Mathematics. He has served as Managing Editor and Editor of Sankhya and as an Associate Editor of Annals of Probability. He has been associated with the NET examination of CSIR (mathematical sciences) and has also been active in statistical consultancy to Industry.

Awards and Honours: Karandikar was awarded the Young Scientist Medal by INSA (1985) and was awarded SS Bhatnagar Prize (1999). He is also a recipient of National Award in Statistics in honour of Professor CR Rao by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (1994).