Rajeeva L Karandikar is currently the Director of the Chennai Mathematical Institute. He holds a PhD (1981) from ISI, Kolkata. He was on the faculty of ISI, Delhi from 1984 till 2006 and has served as the Head of the Delhi Center  of ISI. During 2006–2010, he was the Executive Vice President of Cranes Software, Bengaluru. He works on various aspects of probability theory and is also interested in cryptography, finance, and psephology. He is the recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Mathematical Sciences and the National Award in Statistics in honour of Professor C R Rao by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1994.