Probal Chaudhuri obtained his B-Stat (Hons) (1983) and M-Stat (1985) from Indian Statistical Institute. He went to the University of California at Berkeley and worked under the supervision of Charles J Stone to earn his PhD degree (1988). He worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin (1988-90), returning to India in 1990 when he joined the Theoretical Statistics & Mathematics Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata as a Lecturer and rose to be a Professor.

Academic and Research Achievements: Chaudhuri has made outstanding contributions to diverse areas of theoretical and applied statistics. His primary research contributions are in developing robust and nonparametric statistical techniques that have wide applications in natural, engineering and social sciences. Some of the very well known and widely used statistical techniques and concepts that he has invented and developed include: (i) local polynomial nonparametric quantile regression, (ii) a geometric notion of quantiles for multivariate data, (iii) adaptive transformation and re-transformation technique for the construction of affine invariant distribution free tests and robust estimates from multivariate data and (iv) the scale-space approach in function estimation and smoothing. He has published more than sixty research articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and supervised four PhD students.

Other Contributions: Chaudhuri has served as an Editor of Sankhya : the Indian Journal of Statistics in the past and currently is a Member of the Editorial Board of many prestigious journals such as Journal of the American Statistical Association and Statistica Sinica.

Awards and Honours: Professor Chaudhuri is a recipient of BM Birla Science Award (2001), CR Rao National Award in Statistics (2005) and SS Bhatnagar Award (2005). He is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, USA.