Money to be disbursed annually for 5 years.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Four Indian Americans professors have won grants from the prestigious New York-based non-profit The Simons Foundation.
Kannan Soundararajan, Rajeev Alur, Salil P. Vadhan, and Senthil Todadri are the recipients of this honor. They will be rewarded with $100,000 annually for the next five years, money to be put towards funding their long-term research projects. At the end of the five years, they will be able to apply for a renewal, as well.
Soundararajan is a Stanford professor of mathematics, who the Simons Foundations calls “one of the world’s leaders in analytic number theory and related areas.” He received a highly regarded Sloan Foundation Fellowship as a graduate student, and was a silver medalist at the 1991 International Mathematical Olympiad. Born and raised in Chennai, he graduated with honors from the University of Michigan in 1995, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Alur is considered one of the foremost authorities on the formal modeling and algorithmic analysis of computer systems, according to the Simons Foundation. He is a Zisman Family Professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Computer and Information Science Department. After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, Alur came to the US, where, in 1991, he earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.
Vadhan currently works at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has “produced a series of original and influential papers on computational complexity and cryptography. He uses complexity-theoretic methods and perspectives to delineate the border between the possible and impossible in cryptography and data privacy,” says The Simons Foundation. Vadhan holds an AB in mathematics and computer science from Harvard University, which he received in 1995. Additionally, he received a CAS in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1996 and a Ph.D in applied mathematics from MIT in 1999.
Finally, Todadri is a professor of physics at MIT. He is also a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute of Physics. Like Alur, he is a graduate of IIT Kanpur, but then went on to get his graduate degree from Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at MIT, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, California.
The Simons Foundation is a private foundation incorporated by Jim and Marilyn Simons in 1994. It is dedicated to the advancement of science and mathematical research. Its grants are considered among the field’s most largely coveted grants worldwide.