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Professor V Chandrasekhar was born on November 06, 1958 in Kolkata, received his B Sc and M Sc degrees in Chemistry from Osmania University, Hyderabad. He received his Ph D degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in the year 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. After working in IPCL, Baroda for a year, Dr Chandrasekhar joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur in 1987. He was subsequently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor (1991) and Professor (1995).

He received the Young Scientist Award from the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi in 1989. He was a Homi Bhabha Fellow during 1999-2000. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Gottingen during 1994-95. Recently he received the Wilhelm Bessel Research Award for the year 2003. He was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore in 2003. Recently he received the SS Bhatnagar Prize for the year 2003 in chemical sciences, for his contribution to inorganic rings, cages and polymers from the Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh.

Dr Chandrasekhar is married and he has a son and a daughter.

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Professor Manindra Agrawal was born on May 20, 1966 in Allahabad, received his BTech and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He was a fellow at the School of Mathematics, SPIC Science Foundation, Madras from 1993 to 1995, and a Humboldt Fellow at the Univ of Ulm Germany from 1995 to 1996. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 1996. He was subsequently promoted to the rank of Associated Professor in 1999, and Professor in 2001. He was appointed as the N Rama Rao Chair Professor in 2003.

Professor Agrawal received Young Engineers award from INAE in 1998, Young Scientist award from UP Council for Science and Technology in 2000, Clay Research Award from Clay Mathematical Institute, USA in 2002, ICTP Trieste, Italy prize in 2003, Distinguished Alumnus award from IIT Kanpur in 2003, Global Technovators Award of Indian Business Club of MIT, USA in 2003, and fellowship to work at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, USA in 2003.

He is the architect of encryption systems Trinetra used by Indian Navy to secure their communications, and Indra to be used by Indian Air force. In 2002 he published his seminal paper on "Primes is in P". This paper provided a deterministic polynomial time algorithm for deciding if an input number is prime or not, thereby solving the modern version of a problem which had been open since the time of Euclid. The algorithm is based on a totally new proof technique which has ushered in a new era in computational number theory.

Recently Professor Agrawal received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for the year 2003 in mathematical sciences for his contribution to work in prime numbers from the Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh.

Professor Agrawal is married and he has two daughters.

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