Two Indian Americans and Two Indo-Canadians Named Fellows of American Mathematical Society

Two Indian American professors have been named fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for their “outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.” They include Jennifer S. Balakrishnan of Boston University and Samit Dasgupta of Duke. Joining them are two Indo-Canadians — V. Kumar Murty of the University of Toronto and Malabika Pramanik of the University of British Columbia. 

“It is an honor to welcome a new class of AMS Fellows and to congratulate them for their notable contributions to mathematics and to the profession,” said AMS president Ruth Charney. “We extend our thanks to the nominators and members of the selection committee for their help in highlighting the outstanding achievements of their colleagues.”

Jennifer S. Balakrishnan is the Clare Boothe Luce Associate Professor at Boston University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. AMS named her a fellow for her contributions to arithmetic geometry and computational number theory and service to the profession. She is one of the principal investigators in the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, a large multi-university collaboration. She serves on the board of directors of the Number Theory Foundation and the editorial boards of Research in Number Theory and Mathematics of Computation. Additionally, she is also on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM). Born in Mangilao, Guam, to Narayana Balakrishnan, a chemistry professor at the University of Guam, and Shizuko Balakrishnan, she graduated from Harvard University in 2006, with both a magna cum laude bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in mathematics. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for her doctoral studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2011. 

Samit Dasgupta is a professor of mathematics at Duke University working in algebraic number theory. He was selected as AMS Fellow for his contributions to number theory, in particular the theory of special values of classical and p-adic L-functions. A 1995 graduate of the Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. In 2004, Dasgupta received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Duke, he was a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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V. Kumar Murty, a mathematics professor at the University of Toronto, is the founder of the GANITA lab, co-founder of Prata Technologies and PerfectCloud. His interest in mathematics ranges from the pure study of the subject to its applications in data and information security. After receiving a doctorate from Harvard University, he held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Concordia University, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He was then appointed associate professor at the Downtown campus of the University of Toronto and was later promoted to full professor. In 2001, he was deputed to the Mississauga campus to serve a two-year term as Associate Chair of Mathematics, and from 2004 to 2007 he served as the inaugural chair of the newly-created Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the Mississauga campus.

Malabika Pramanik is a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Her interests include harmonic analysis, complex variables, and partial differential equations. Pramanik studied statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1993 and a master’s in 1995. She then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a doctorate in mathematics in 2001. After short-term positions at the University of Wisconsin, University of Rochester, and California Institute of Technology, she joined the UBC faculty in 2006. She was appointed director of the Banff International Search Station or BIRS in 2020. She is the 2015–2016 winner of the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the 2016 winner of the Krieger–Nelson Prize, given annually by the Canadian Mathematical Society to an outstanding female researcher in mathematics.