Infosys prize winners named

The Infosys Prize carries the largest purse in the country for scientific research.
Each winner will receive a 22-carat gold medallion, a citation certificate and a prize money of Rs 50 lakh.

The award ceremony for the Infosys Prize 2011 will be held on January 9, 2012 in Bangalore, where Dr A P J Abdul Kalam will felicitate the winners. The winners were declared by the trustees of the Infosys Science Foundation. They also unveiled the ‘Infosys Prize Lectures,’ a series of public talks on research and experiences of laureates and distinguished jurors of the Prize, with a view to motivate and encourage young talent to undertake research as a career. 

The jury chairs of the five disciplines were: Prof Amartya Sen for Social Sciences, Prof Shrinivas Kulkarni for Physical Sciences, Prof Pradeep K Khosla for Engineering and Computer Science, Prof S R Varadhan for Mathematical Sciences and Prof Inder Verma for Life Sciences.

The winners of the Infosys Prize 2011 are:  Engineering and Computer Science: Prof Kalyanmoy Deb, Gurmukh and Veena Mehta, Endowed Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kanpur and the Director of the Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory, Kanpur, India.

Life Sciences: Dr Imran Siddiqi, Scientist and Group Leader, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, India.

Mathematical Sciences: Prof Kannan Soundararajan, Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Mathematics Research Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA.
Physical Sciences: Prof Sriram Ramaswamy, Professor, CCMT, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Social Sciences - Economics: Prof Raghuram G Rajan, Eric J Gleacher, Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and the Charles M Harper Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Chicago, USA.

Social Sciences - Political Science and International Relations: Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

No increase in categories
Speaking on the occasion, Infosys Chairman Emeritus N R Narayana Murthy said the company was open to increasing the number of prize categories for scientists depending on returns it gets from its corpus. But right now, there was no such proposal.

“Right now, we are focused on five prize categories, but depending on the returns that we get from the corpus and recommendations given by various people, including Jury Chairs, Board of Trustees of Infosys Science Foundation, we will meet and consider from time-to-time (to increase prize categories),” he said.

Congratulating the winners, Murthy said their efforts and dedication to science, discovery and development will no doubt inspire educationists and researchers in India and around the world to strive harder to excel in science and technology and attain global recognition.

Responding to a query, Infosys Board of Directors member Mohandas Pai said the company had no plan of giving research grant to young talent from the corpus, but wanted to create new 'science heroes' through interaction with Infosys prize-winning scientists.

The Infosys Science Foundation is a not-for-profit trust set up in February 2009 by the management of Infosys.