Govindan Rangarajan

Govindan Rangarajan, (b. 18 September 1963) is an Indian mathematician, academician, and a professor. He is currently serving as the Director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore, India and as a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the same. Rangarajan obtained his integrated Master of Science degree with honours from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, in 1985, and his PhD degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1990. He was a Staff Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Indian Institute of Science as an assistant professor in 1992. Rangarajan's research areas include nonlinear dynamics, chaos, time series analysis, and computational biology. His work is applied in areas such as neuroscience, geophysics and accelerator physics. As a co-principal investigator of the Indo-French Cyber University Project, he helped establish the first inter-continental satellite-based courses. These courses were taught live to Indian and French students in various subject areas. He also headed the National Mathematics Initiative, which ran instructional schools and workshops in cutting-edge areas at the interface between mathematics and other fields. He was instrumental in setting up and running the interdisciplinary PhD programme in mathematical sciences. He also headed the Indo-US Virtual Institute for Mathematics and Statistical Sciences, which was jointly set up by the National Science Foundation and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, India. Rangarajan is currently the Director of the Indo-French Centre for Applied Mathematics (IFCAM), the first Unités Mixtes Internationales of CNRS in India. This is a joint venture between the Department of Science and Technology, India, and a consortium of French institutions. IFCAM supports joint research projects between India and France in the broad area of applied mathematics. Rangarajan has also served as the chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Convener, Digital Information Services Centre from 2002 to 2008.