The Infosys Prize is an annual award granted to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin (not necessarily born in India)[1] by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards for research in India. The prize for each category includes a gold medallion, a citation certificate, and prize money of US$100,000 (or equivalent in Indian Rupees).[2] The prize purse is tax free for winners living in India.[3] The winners are selected by the jury of their respective categories, headed by the jury chairs.
In 2008, the prize was jointly awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation and National Institute of Advanced Studies for mathematics.[4] The following year, three additional categories were added: Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. In 2010, Engineering and Computer Science was added as a category. In 2012, a sixth category, Humanities, was added.
Laureates in Engineering and Computer Science
The Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science has been awarded annually since 2010.
Awarded "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the fields of surfaces and interfaces, adhesion, pattern formation, nanocomposites, materials science, and hydrodynamics, which have practical applications in such areas as energy storage, filtration, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and optoelectronics."
Awarded "for his incisive contributions in molecular tailoring of stimuli responsive smart polymeric gels; exploring the anomalous behavior of rheologically complex fluids, and for building the bridge between macromolecular dynamics and polymer processing."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his wide-ranging contributions to nanoscale electronics, for integrating chemistry with mechanics and electronics to invent new functional devices, and for innovation and entrepreneurship in creating technologies and products of societal value."[citation needed]
Awarded "for being a pioneer in the design and optimization of database engines that form the core of modern enterprise information systems. His many contributions have found direct use in various types of databases including decision‑support, biological and multilingual databases, as well as produced software tools for query optimization and metadata processing."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his innovative use of first- principles theories and modeling in insightful investigations of microscopic mechanisms responsible for specific properties of specific materials such as topological insulators, ferroelectrics, multiferroics and 2-dimensional materials like graphene."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his seminal work in complex fluids and complex flows and especially in transition and turbulence in soft-walled tubes and channels."[citation needed]
Awarded "for her scholarly record in algorithmic optimization and for its significant impact on biological data analysis. Her discoveries include a genetic marker for breast cancer, determination of co-occurrence of HIV and cancers and the role of white matter in Alzheimer's disease."[6]
Awarded "for his work on the design of novel biosensors based on his research in biochemistry and gaseous sensors that push the performance limits of existing metal-oxide sensors. The prize recognizes his efforts to build a state-of-the-art infrastructure for research and talent training in nanoscale systems and for developing technologies for space and national security applications."[7]
Awarded "for her research in databases, data mining, machine learning and natural language processing, and for important applications of these research techniques."[8]
Awarded "for his broad contributions to computer networking, his seminal work on mobile and wireless systems."[9]
2021
Chandrasekhar Nair
Molbio Diagnostics
Awarded for "his development and large-scale commercialization of Truenat, a new point-of-care testing platform for PCR-based medical diagnostics. Dr. Nair’s work has enabled testing for millions of COVID-19 cases across resource-limited settings in India and the diagnosis of multiple infectious diseases including tuberculosis all over the world."[10]
Awarded for "his pioneering work in elucidating the interaction of fluid mechanics, interfacial phenomena, and electromechanics at the micro- and nanoscale. Using this understanding he has helped to advance healthcare in resource-limited settings through the invention of novel low-cost medical devices for sensing, diagnostics and therapeutics."[11]
Awarded "for the deployment of large-scale sensor-based air quality network and mobile laboratory for hyper local measurements of pollution, data generation and analysis using AI+ML for effective air quality management and citizen awareness, and for the discovery of new pathways of aerosols formation and growth that provide mechanistic understanding of haze formation."[12]
Laureates in Humanities
The Infosys Prize in Humanities has been awarded annually since 2012.
Awarded "for his path-breaking contribution to history. He is an outstanding scholar of early-modern (1500-1800) South Asian history. He has been able to develop a new genre of 'connected history,’ involving persons, products, and social and political processes stretching from Melaka in the East to Portugal in the West."[13]
Awarded "for his imaginative and illuminating writings in literary criticism, which reflect a complex literary sensibility, and great theoretical mastery, along with a probing sense of detail. The Infosys Prize recognizes and celebrates the intellectual reach and the quiet humanity in his extraordinary writings."[14]
Awarded "for her outstanding contribution towards the integration of archaeological knowledge with the historical understanding of India from the earliest times. She is an exceptional scholar of proto-historic and early India. Her wide-ranging work on the past and present illuminates many aspects that include contemporary Indian society."[15]
Awarded "for her exceptional contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics. Her research on syntactic relations in Hindi-Urdu has related wider debates in linguistics to the study of Indian languages and has extended our understanding of India's linguistic diversity."[16]
Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to a broad range of legal issues and legal education. He has been doing this with remarkable fair‑mindedness in assessing opposing positions taken on quintessentially controversial areas, such as intellectual property laws."[17]
Awarded "for his outstanding scholarship and originality in interpreting and scrutinizing analytical Indian Philosophy. He has thrown light on the shared ground as well as the dichotomy between Indian and Greek traditions of philosophical reasoning, thereby illuminating both."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to the history of migration, environmental history, and the history of international public health, and in recognition of his field-changing research on the interrelated past of contemporary Asia."[18]
Awarded "for her highly original explorations of the long-standing historical elements - conceptual, social and cultural - in colonial modernity, and for her subtle and insightful ethnography of cultural and political life in Kashmir."[19]
Awarded "for her extraordinarily illuminating study of Mughal, Rajput and Deccan art, as well as her insightful writing on the historical function and role of museums and their significance in the increasingly fraught and conflicted social world in which visual culture exists today."[7]
Awarded for "her deeply researched and sophisticated analysis of conversion and violence in the Portuguese empire in India, especially Goa.Her extensive body of writings in both English and Portuguese have shown Xavier to be an important and original voice on colonial and imperial history."[21]
Awarded for "his insightful understanding of the Indian Constitution, especially his carefully argued account of the importance of the landmark ‘basic structure doctrine’ adopted by the Supreme Court in 1973 that guides and constrains various efforts to amend it, while also ensuring its stability in the face of executive and legislative outcomes in India’s political life.[22]
Awarded for "her brilliant and granular insights into the individual, institutional, and material histories of scientific research in modern India..[23]
Awarded "for his pioneering work in understanding the interactions of the malarial parasite and its host, leading to the development of a viable malaria vaccine."[26]
Awarded "for his breakthrough contributions to the basic understanding of clonal seed formation in plants which can be applied to revolutionize agriculture, especially in the developing world."[27]
Awarded "for new insights into regulated cell surface organization and membrane dynamics, necessary for understanding self-organization and trafficking of membrane molecules in living cells, and in signaling between cells."[28]
Awarded "for his work in the field of lipid metabolism in M. tuberculosis. He discovered fatty acyl AMP ligases in tubercle bacillus, their role in the generation of the lipid components of its cell wall and of their existence in other organisms, where they play a role in biosynthesis of complex molecules."[29]
Awarded "for her significant contributions to our understanding of how the brain's structure and circuitry are formed in the embryo. Her research uncovers common genetic mechanisms that control the development of the hippocampus, cortex and amygdala."[30]
Awarded "for his pioneering contributions towards deciphering the molecular structure, at the atomic level, of key proteins involved in the biology of pathogenesis of the malarial parasite."[citation needed]
Awarded "for her pioneering contributions to understanding the natural history of rotavirus and other infectious diseases that are important both globally and in India. Her findings have enormous implications for vaccines and other public health measures to thwart these infections."[31]
Awarded "for his pioneering contributions to the understanding of the brain's computational machinery. His investigations have revealed essential neuronal computations that underlie the ability to acquire, integrate and store complex sensory information, and to utilize that information for decision and action."[32]
Awarded "for his pioneering work on molecular motor proteins, which are crucial for the functioning of living cells. Mallik has identified and measured forces needed to transport large particles inside cells, and demonstrated their role in fundamental processes such as targeting pathogens for their destruction and moving lipid droplets for fatty acid regulation in the liver."[7]
Awarded "for fundamental contributions towards understanding one of the most basic mechanisms in biology, the error-free translation of the genetic code to make protein molecules."[9]
Awarded in "recognition of his pioneering work on the ecology of tropical savannah ecosystems, his contributions to highlighting the biodiversity of important Indian ecosystems such as the Western Ghats, and his input to international reports on climate change and biodiversity that have provided scientific evidence to policy makers."[34]
Awarded "for her fundamental contributions to understanding brain mechanisms that underlie mood disorders such as anxiety and depression, including signals engaged by the neurotransmitter serotonin in causing persistent changes in behavior induced by early life stress and the role of serotonin in energy regulation in brain cells."[35]
Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to the biology of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), a key component of cell function. His studies have elegantly illustrated mechanisms that selectively activate signaling pathways downstream of GPCRs. These and other discoveries provide fundamental understanding of the context-dependent functions of GPCRs and suggest a new framework for the design of novel therapeutics."[36]
Laureates in Mathematical Sciences
The Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences has been awarded annually since 2008.
Awarded "for his outstanding contribution in the field of complexity theory, a branch of mathematics and computer science concerned with the study of algorithms for solving mathematical and related scientific problems, and especially their efficiency and running times."[37]
Awarded "for his path breaking work in analytic number theory and development of new techniques to study critical values of general zeta functions to prove the Quantum Unique Ergodicity Conjecture for classical holomorphic forms."[40]
Awarded "for his extraordinarily original work in algebraic number theory. His work has revolutionized the way in which various fundamental arithmetic objects, such as number fields and elliptic curves, are understood."[41]
Awarded "for his profound work in algebraic geometry. In particular, for his work on Gromov-Witten theory for Riemann surfaces, for predicting the connection between Gromov-Witten and Donaldson‑Thomas theories, and for his recent work with Aaron Pixton that establishes this connection for Calabi-Yau 3-folds."[42]
Awarded "for his seminal contributions to theoretical computer science, especially in the areas of Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCP) and error‑correcting codes."[43]
Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology and complex geometry. In particular, for establishing a central conjecture in the Thurston program to study hyperbolic 3-manifolds and introducing important new tools to study fundamental groups of complex manifolds."[44]
Awarded "for his exceptionally wide-ranging, foundational and creative contributions to modern number theory. His unique ability to use wide-ranging techniques drawn from analytic number theory, ergodic theory, homotopy theory to address concrete problems in number theory and discover new phenomena attest to the essential unity of mathematics."[45]
Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to analytic aspects of number theory. Besides ingenious contributions to the Diophantine problem, he has established important estimates known as sub-convexity bounds for a large class of L-functions with methods that are powerful and original."[46]
Awarded "for the effective use of entropy in the study of semiclassical limits of eigenstates in quantum analogs of chaotic dynamical systems and for her work on the delocalization of eigenfunctions on large regular graphs."[47]
Awarded "for his outstanding contributions to Applied Mathematics, in particular for designing computational methods that solve non-linear partial differential equations arising in different areas, analyzing their effectiveness and designing algorithms to implement them."[48]
Awarded "for his contribution to a deeper understanding of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity in the context of thermodynamics, and for his work on the large scale structure in cosmology."[52]
Awarded "for finding an ingenious way to solve two of the most outstanding puzzles of Superstring Theory simultaneously: What is the origin of dark energy of the Universe? Why is there no massless scalar particle?"[citation needed]
Awarded "for his pioneering development of methods for the construction of supramolecular functional materials, which can be employed as components in organic electronic devices and in powerful substance selective optical sensing and imaging."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his pioneering contributions to the study of string theory, quantum field theory and gravity, and for uncovering a deep connection between the equations of fluid and superfluid dynamics and Einstein's equations of general relativity."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his diverse and notable contributions in synthetic organic chemistry with special focus on the synthesis of complex molecules from natural sources. He has devised innovative, practical approaches to pharmaceuticals of current interest to industry."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his pioneering experimental contributions to the physics of high intensity laser matter interactions. In particular for providing, for the first time, unequivocal evidence of turbulent magnetic fields and the discovery of terahertz frequency acoustic waves, in laser produced hot dense plasmas. These results have significance to testing stellar and astrophysical scenarios."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his experiments on Chandrayaan-1 and Mars Orbiter missions that revealed new features of solar wind interactions with lunar surface and provided important clues for understanding thermal escape of the Martian atmosphere. He also made very significant contributions in detection and delineation of the nature and origin of planetary X-rays."[citation needed]
Awarded "for her ground-breaking work in the emerging field of architecture of the building blocks of life—the DNA. By successfully manipulating DNA to create biocompatible nanomachines she has created novel ways of interrogating living systems, increasing our knowledge of cell function and getting one step closer to answering unresolved biomedical questions."[54]
Awarded "for his pioneering scientific work in the field of climate change. His studies on black carbon aerosols, the dark, light absorbing, microscopic particles in air which greatly influence the energy balance of the atmosphere over the Indian subcontinent, have enabled a better understanding of the role of these particles on climate change, precipitation, and, human health in the Indian subcontinent."[55]
Awarded "for his development of atomically thin two-dimensional semiconductors to build a new generation of functional electronic, thermoelectric and optoelectronic devices."[9]
Awarded "in recognition of her contributions as an outstanding analyst of social identities, including tribe and caste, and the politics of knowledge in modern India."[citation needed]
Awarded "for broadening public discussion of important social, political and economic matters, bringing in heterodox perspectives and for constantly challenging reigning orthodoxies."[63]
Awarded "for his game-theoretic analyses of mechanism design for implementing social choice rules, when individuals have diverse information and incentives."[citation needed]
Awarded "for her distinctive and pioneering research that spans a remarkable range covering four main areas: Agrarian society at the intersection of economy, culture and environment; school education in varied regional contexts; globalization and its impact on the moral economy of urban occupations; and social science as seen from the vantage point of Indian languages and regional cultures."[citation needed]
Awarded "in recognition of her pioneering and prodigious contributions to development economics, with important implications for policies pertaining to the delivery of services to the poor."[citation needed]
Awarded "for outstanding research that synthesizes military history, international politics, and strategic analysis into powerful and imaginative perspectives on India in global context."[citation needed]
Awarded "in recognition of his remarkably deep analysis of the multifaceted role of communities, such as ethnic groups and castes, in the process of economic development."[citation needed]
Awarded "for his creative scholarship on law and society. His prodigious output in the fields of copyright law, digital technologies and media, and popular culture consistently raises probing questions about the nature of freedom, rights, and social development. His provocative answers link historical context and ethical practice in unexpected and illuminating ways."[64]
Awarded "for his path-breaking work in behavioral economics. Mullainathan's research has had substantial impact on diverse fields such as development, public finance, corporate governance and policy design. A significant part of this work is relevant to India. He is currently working on big data and machine learning issues and applications in economics."[65]
Awarded "for his pioneering research on identifying barriers to economic opportunity and for developing solutions to help people escape from poverty towards better life outcomes."[9]
Awarded for her "outstanding research on subjects of key importance, including governance and accountability, women’s empowerment, the role of credit in the lives of the poor, and the environment. Her empirical findings, based on diverse methodologies, offer major promise and potential for policy design in emerging economies, including India."[68]
Awarded for her "groundbreaking research on the theory of imperial rule, and the claim that this late imperial ideology became one of the important factors in the emergence of modern social theory. "[69]
Awarded for his "truly outstanding and seminal contributions to the study of maritime Islam in a global perspective, with particular focus on Kerala in the pre-modern and early modern eras. [24]
Lawrence Liang, a professor of law awarded the Infosys Prize, was found guilty by an internal university inquiry committee of sexually harassing a doctoral student on multiple occasions.[70][71][72][73][74] Following the adverse finding, prominent activists, academics and gender rights groups issued a public statement on social media condemning Liang and criticising the award of the Infosys Prize to Liang.[75]
